Is there a reason there is one hole drilled off center on the channel aluminum for the frame.
We mounted our center wheels on that hole, and it raises our front wheels off of the ground. In turn not letting us have all 6 wheels on the ground at the same time. Can we modify the frame so that all wheels will be flat on the bottom? Or is there a better solution?
Thanks
The center hole is purposefully lowered to create the condition you’re seeing. You don’t want all six wheels touching the ground at once, as it may make it difficult for your robot to turn in place. The kitbot provides a frame to you implementing what are commonly considered to be best practices for FIRST robot design.
+1, The six and eight wheels drop center drives are the gold standard in FIRST, in all their iterations and off shoots, such as WCD.
To understand this concept, draw a top view of your robot and consider how it turns about the center. The 2 middle wheels move tangent to the circle in their direction of rotation, while the 4 outboard wheels move at an angle so they tend to drag sideways (and you’ll see robots “jumping” as they turn to overcome this). The idea is to let the center wheels hold most of the weight while turning, so along with this you want to try to have your center of mass as close to the center of the robot (that hole) as possible.
We use omni-wheels on the corners, so we don’t have to worry about the corner wheels dragging (as much ;)).
This is our 4th year doing that (even though we’re only using 4 wheels this year) and we love the performance.
Flip your c-channel around. The middle wheel should be lowered, not raised so you can have a smaller wheel base.
No. They have it correct, as is. You mis-read.
This is why you don’t post when tired. Good catch, my bad. Continue rocking on.