On your octocanum, are you employing pneumatic suspension on the mecanum wheel itself, the traction wheel, or both?
It looked like you had fixed motors, so I’m guessing just one, but hard to tell in the video.
If you are suspending the mecanum, do you have any more details, cad, or pictures of your design?
We are starting an off-season octocanum drive and it seems like an air-suspended mecanum makes the most sense, but want to make sure we arent missing any details. What kind of cylinders are you using and have you had any pneumatic isses with running like that?
The Octocanum uses 1" stroke 3/4 diameter pancake cylinders to switch back and forth between traction and Mecanum. When it’s in Mecanum the cylinders act as suspension. We started out with a fancy variable pressure system which would vary the suspension pressure depending on how many totes we were carrying. Over the course of the season the Octocanum has been slowly defeatured as we needed weight for other things. Now we just stay in Mecanum for the match with the traction wheels being helpful for getting over the scoring platforms. It was a good engineerng project, though.
These days we have a can grabber, fancier /faster tote collection, and a better forklift that can handle kicked over cans. Those aren’t shown in the video but will be in action in St. Louis.
Having suspension on Mecanum does indeed make it strafe better. For this game, though, we found it didn’t make enough difference to be worth the weight compared to other features we could add. Our software and heading sensor can compensate for Mecanum drift over short distances which, as it turns out is all we typically need in a match.
