Best Drive Train

[jwfoss]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Whatever works for your strategy.

...and is within the resources (cost, machining, etc) for your team.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Wing

100% of all nine-sided drive base robots have won einstein.

Similarly if 6wd swerve has 100% chance of making it to Einstein I'm sure 8wd swerve would win.


For us on 3467 its 6wd all the way! Its simple, easy to build/maintain, provides great maneuverability/speed, and is extremely reliable. I'm sure down the road we will experiment with fancier systems but this fall we will work to refine our 6wd on a custom level that is better, lighter, and more reliable than any of our prior drive systems.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Wing

100% of all nine-sided drive base robots have won einstein.

It's why next year, we're building a Triple Killough.

[orangemoore]

One drive train that is not thought of a lot is no drive train at all.

[NXTGeek]

Originally Posted by orangemoore

One drive train that is not thought of a lot is no drive train at all.

I would think a drive base would be worth the extra 20pts for dumping and the slightly more adaptive strategy (hybrid climb/defense)...

[orangemoore]

Originally Posted by NXTGeek

I would think a drive base would be worth the extra 20pts for dumping and the slightly more adaptive strategy (hybrid climb/defense)...

Our team is really small. We have at the most 15 people. Most of the those people do not come every day and work for all the time so we had to decide to do one thing. My team chose to climb. We ended up spending close to half of our build season building a pyramid corner so that we could corner climb. With a week left we decided to scrap the idea and build a 20 point side climber. Those pictures are of our first legal climb to 20.

I know what you are talking about. In my team I was a huge advocate for not doing a climber because I thought a climber (without a drive train) was an all or nothing approach. I was really surprised and happy that this year in competition we were the 8th seed alliance captain which is the best we have ever done.

There are good things about having a really small team. This year is my freshman year. My team also does FTC where I was one of the hardest working people. Because of that I was able to be the sole operator of our robot. It for me was a great experience.

[pmangels17]

Straight up Six Wheel Tank will work every time. If you have time/space/weight/money, adding a two speed shifter is a great way to spice up a tank drive for more versatility. Throw in some roughtop tread and #35 chain for the drive, and you can fight it out with the best of 'em. Two speeds and decent traction will let you overcome most defenders with easy. There is no reason to waste time on a swerve or other drive, though omni-wheel rockers on a 4 wheel setup are also very effective and cool. In my opinion, finish the tank early rather than spending time on a swerve and get more driving practice.

Swerve is cool and all, but it isn't necessary. There was only 1 swerve on Einstein this year. And the winning alliance was all tank. Because it works

[runneals]

I felt that our Butterfly Drive Module was extremely effective this year. We could go fast with omni's (15fps) and also drop down to traction mode (which we really enjoyed playing with because of the pneumatics) to push robots, mentors, members, and pyramids (although our robot usually lost).

Last year, we were the team with the Innovative Swerve Drive Module. This was one of the lightest and most compact modules out there. Although we never got time to train our drivers with it, we tend to not recommend it to other teams with the issues we experienced with it, although we like to see what other teams innovate on existing swerve drives. Feel free to check out our CD post on our swerve drive, which has had lots of discussion.

[cgmv123]

We like our 6-wheel tank drive that we've used in some form or another since 2010.

2010: Long Kit Bot frame. Wedgetop wheels in center. Omni-wheels in the corners. 4 Toughboxes with One CIM each powering each of the back 4 wheels.

2011: Long Kit Bot frame. Plaction roughtop wheels in center. Omni wheels in corners. 2 CIMple boxes with 2 CIMs each powering center wheels only.

2012: Wide Kit Bot frame. Plaction roughtop wheels in center. Omni wheels in corners. 2 CIMple boxes with 2 CIMs each powering back 4 wheels.

2013: 29*25 Kit Bot frame. Plaction roughtop wheels in the rear. Omni wheels in the front. 2 Kit Toughbox Minis with one CIM each powering rear wheels only. (I know there's only 4 wheels this year, but the design was inspired by our success the 6 wheel drivetrains in the past.)

Omni-wheels mean you can spin in a circle with no issues. It's about as maneuverable as you can get without a Swerve drive, Holonomic or Mecanum, with way more traction than Holonomic or Mecanum, and I'd argue Swerve as well and it blows them all away in speed and ease of building/programming.

That said, I agree that there is no one drivetrain that works every time. You might want Swerve if and when we get a maze game.

[Anupam Goli]

There is no universal best drivetrain, but if you look at complexity and cost vs experience, you CANNOT go wrong with the Kitbot on Steroids. It takes 3 hours to build, a couple more hours to wire and program, and it is a regional winning drive train. Heck, I bet there are teams that have gone to Einstein with this drive train.

[NXTGeek]

Originally Posted by orangemoore

Our team is really small. We have at the most 15 people. Most of the those people do not come every day and work for all the time so we had to decide to do one thing. My team chose to climb. We ended up spending close to half of our build season building a pyramid corner so that we could corner climb. With a week left we decided to scrap the idea and build a 20 point side climber. Those pictures are of our first legal climb to 20.

I know what you are talking about. In my team I was a huge advocate for not doing a climber because I thought a climber (without a drive train) was an all or nothing approach. I was really surprised and happy that this year in competition we were the 8th seed alliance captain which is the best we have ever done.

There are good things about having a really small team. This year is my freshman year. My team also does FTC where I was one of the hardest working people. Because of that I was able to be the sole operator of our robot. It for me was a great experience.

If you need help with your small team, I invite you to contact me or another 3476 member. My story:
Last year, I was a freshman, and brought CAD design to the team. We had very limited funds, tools, manpower, or space. We still build our robots out of extruded aluminum in a 2-car garage with a tabletop chopsaw and bandsaw. We built a simple robot- and won SDR with it. We had 15 students on the team, with a ~7 member "core" team. After that season, we impacted over 20,000 people and had our program grow to 22 students representing 16 different high schools and 6 homeschoolers.
We simply worked hard, and because of that we eventually got rewarded for that effort. Anyone can do that.

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by Wing

100% of all nine-sided drive base robots have won einstein.

And don't forget about 6wd swerves!

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Swerve has always seemed to me like an unambiguous favorite if you have a good, light design, fantastic programming, a practiced drive team that know how to use it strategically, and the resources to pull it off cleanly.

Fixed it for you.

Swerve is hard to beat in terms of agility if you do this. It'll par on durability and has a lot of benefits on pushing force and will get you most any speed you want, though if you're talking about shifting it's considerably harder than slapping a Super Shifter on a tank drive.

[NXTGeek]

Here is a ranking my team made:

We picked 6WD shifting WCD for our strategy, and we couldn't have been successful in our strategy without it. Not only was it maneuverable, fast, and strong, but it also cleared out a ton of extra room inside the chassis.

[blayde5]

What about fan-bots?

On a more serious note, I have seen very very very few years where a good 6 WD dropped center drive won't do well in a game. It's easy to do, a lot of people have done it, and it just frees up so much time to deal with the rest.