This is the module for the all terrain swerve that I modled. The gears would be taken straight out of an andymark single speed for ease of development. It would be very easy, if expensive, to make.
Any thoughts?
This is the module for the all terrain swerve that I modled. The gears would be taken straight out of an andymark single speed for ease of development. It would be very easy, if expensive, to make.
i had this very idea before and constructed a few working lego models of it. i found that the treads needed a boogie wheel to function as a swerve unit. The tagging function was not aserted at the time i uploaded it. keep it up its cool
EDIT: here it is http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/18460
what sort of motor will you use to turn the module? with that much scrub, it may require a bit more power than a traditional swerve.
How do you plan on insuring the tread stay on the wheels? With that long of constant contact on a flat surface, turing the modules would likely knock off the treads.
the treads would stay on with a groove in the middle but the modules would only turn when the robot was moving so this would hopefully not be much of a problem. I would be using a fisher price to turn the module through a 42mm 256:1 banebot gearbox.
The reason that I don’t want to use a third roller to reduce turning force is because the module passively rotates on one of two axes. If there was a third wheel then it wouldn’t be stable and there wouldn’t be as much surface area on the ground and the point force is higher. Since this would be for an all terrain robot this would be detrimental to moving through things like mud. I know that the gears need more protection for things like that.
Thanks for the thoughts and that lego bot is sweet 
Nice, I like the design… I am working on something also, just as a prototype that I think will be pretty sweet. All I need is a real tank, about $500,000.00 and a couple ounces of plutonium, some nuclear scientists, and an orange. Hopefully I can find a sponsor that will hook me up… oh… Is it against the rules to have a nuclear reactor as a power supply in FRC?
if your looking for ‘all terrain’ in the real world it means things like mud sand and snow. all deformable surfaces where having a ferfectly flat tread on the deformed surface produces no advantage. a tread in a crab module in a deformable surface becomes like a spoon mixing batter and on a non deformable surface like concrete it acts like an anchor. a tremendous resistance to rotation . and ut this on a first carpet it becomes a machine that is only sterable while its moving. negating the advantage of a swerve drive in the first place. your design and drawings are cool but their only that at this point. practacalty needs to superseed awesome models and drawings
Take a look at this. One of my teammates works at MobileRobots, the company who builds these things ,so I have got a chance to see one of these crab-steering beasts. They are huge! They’re designed for patrolling perimeters and for surveillance.
You should do the math to see if the modules can even be rotated by the FP.