Ingenious!
I love how this Idea takes the best of all worlds to provide a simple solution to the problems Overdrive presents.
This is a very nice variation of the Kiwi drive, but I am thinking it is based upon 4 main wheels driving and 2 secondary wheels for steering.
How do you handle the required variation in wheel speed between the right and left main wheel sets while cornering?
Good job!
Our design is very similar. Have you had any issues with control at high speed?
No control issues as of yet, though we’ve only been able to test it on a 10’ by 10’ square of carpet so far.
Not sure why you would need to vary the speeds of the wheels to turn. It’s just a basic skid steering layout. The kids tell me it’s easy because it’s set up like “Halo” controls.
We had some control problems with maintaining a straight heading at high speed but we are switching to a single joystick drive system. Hopefully that will take care of the problem.
Good luck!
This appears to be what we tried - 4 wheel skid steer omnis with two wheels perpendicular to those 4 to provide translation (6 total).
Unfortunately what we found was that no matter how carefully we aligned the bottom of the wheels, we either had too much weight on the outsides and not enough sideways traction, or the translate wheels were down too much and one side of the tank drive was off the ground.
It looked like this:
|x…xxx…x|
|x…x|
|…|
|…|
|x…x|
|x…xxx…x|
x’s are the wheels
We had that problem initially, but a little “adjustment” with a long lever and a couple students standing on the frame we raised the side wheels slightly which seemed to alleviate the problem.
I’m currently worrying more about the plates in the center of the field.