Wheel Size?

I just noticed that the rule book has no mention of the wheel size constraints. Any thoughts?

I think it may be possible to get over the 4" bump with no restrictions, besides I guess a 38" wheel…

You can make your robot have two bike wheels and it will be fine assuming that you can program your robot to stay balanced at a flat angle.

Did some one say segway bot?

As long as none of your wheels are above 60 inches in diameter, I’m sure everything will be just fine.

I so want to use 60" wheels now!

But the wheel needs to be contained in the bumper perimeter… Or did that change this year?

I don’t want to rain on your parade, but they couldn’t possibly be any larger than 36 inches in diameter if you plan on building a 28x38 inch frame around them.

That why I said 38" the maximum no height dimension.

So it sounds like you could use larger wheels to get over the barrier much easier?

Other than design constraints, nothing is stopping you from doing it.

I think we should use a custom sized tank drive system that is the exact maximum dimensions allowed. That way, if the robot gets flipped over it can still drive, and we can get over the bump.:cool:

You should totally make adaptive-geometry wheels to get over the bump in the middle. :smiley:

How about a Tweel?
They might be used in future lunar rovers, so they should be good enough for FIRST.

Along the lines of cool and not really helpful.

I have not been able to come up with a engineering reason as to why tri-star wheel is better than a regular wheel of the same over all size. But like the design all the same. For those that aren’t sure what is going on here it is the same setup as a planetary gear system with the ground acting as the ring gear.

I remember seeing an old 2004 clip on youtube with a bot that used them to climb the stairs…

Yeah, there was a segway bot sketch made by one of the younger mentors during the kickoff…

Of course the discussion deteriorated to a unicycle robot.

There should be no limit to the size of wheels you can use besides the 38" limit, but think about how tippy the robot would be with larger wheels.

someone forgot about putting the wheels in diagonal. so find the hypotenuse, then that’s accurate.

44.407in with a frame made of 1in on a side.

We have successfully gone from the realm of intelligent engineering to the realm of infeasible, useless number mashing.

Oh come on now. Impractical at worst. :o