This is an implentation of what is called “Slide Drive”. We have five 4" omni wheels (doubled up for better floor contact), 4 of which are in typical tank drive arrangement and the last in the middle pointed sideways. This drive train has 3 degrees of freedom (fwd/back, strafe, rotate) and is pretty fast and maneuverable while staying pretty simple. Even over the course of this video we are getting a hang of some of the cool nuances of this thing, and we hope to have regular drive practice to really get at moving around. Read more about it at our blog.
This is always a major achievement, but we still have a ways to go before we have a competitive machine. Gripper, elevator, and minibot all need to be finalized and built.
Heh, yeah I’m always randomly omitting or replacing words subconciously…
We’re favoring acceleration on the strafe wheel because we shouldn’t be strafing over long distances. However, we can very easily swap out sprockets for a smaller reduction. Right now it’s running off 2 CIMs into a CIMple to a 14 to 42 sprocket stage because our Banebots aren’t in yet, so we’ll have to see how it does with 2 775s in CIMulators…
nice job my team had come up with nearly the same idea but then decied against it because we wanted two cims for our arm (which we still got done to one anyways so we could still have done this)
It could just be the driving style, but it seems like the robot seems to roll sideways quite a bit after power has been turned off to the slide wheel. Are the electronics set to brake?
(I realize sideways friction is likely far less than forward direction friction, but this still seems like alot of drifting to me)
