Team 401 decided to start developing some new 3d printed options for 2 inch diameter intakes rollers. Our first design is a cross between a mecanum and an omni wheel with rollers at 22.5 degrees from an omni wheel. The idea was to bias the intaking a little to pull in balls more than a normal mecanum wheel does. The rollers use a 1/16th steel shaft for the axle and is designed t be printed with washout support material (and a rubber tread on the roller if you have a multi material printer). We will be making an omni wheel and traditional mecanum wheel version in the future which will also be posted here.
Test video (if you have any other ideas let us know)
Have you tested that setup with a results 2” wheel? It looks like the wheel may be hitting the wheel on the side and causing it to spin, and that’s what makes the ball shoot sideways rather than the mecanum effect itself.
Also, how well do the printed rollers slide on the axles without bushings?
We can do the test tomorrow on the test rig. The rollers do spin. Sure you will loose some efficiency if this was used as a drive wheel, but since it is an intake it doesn’t matter.
33 has done some development work on our own printed 2" vectored intake wheel as well after seeing the implementations from 125, 1678, 3476, and others. We will likely post some information about we have ended up with for ours soon but after using it on our 2019 robot for our cargo intake this off-season we have been pretty happy with results.
One of the evolutions ours has made is the limitations of the pin as the roller shaft. We ended up having a boss on either half of the hub that the roller spins on. We have also modified our design to utilize COTS nylon spacers for the rollers to simplify the design and minimize cost. We also made an effort to have the rollers be outside the OD of the hub as much as possible.
