With the V5 motor limit being 8, I was thinking about how I could make a 3 motor meccanum drive and I totally blanked. Is this possible and if so has anyone done it?
I don’t think it’s possible because all four wheels need individual directions, if I’m correct? I have a 4m mecanum drive so I don’t quite know.
No i don’t think this is possible because the purpose of a meccanum drive is to strafe, which means each wheel must move seperately from the rest of its side.
Now if you wanted to do three motors and still be able to strafe, you could use an h-drive, which uses 5 omni wheels to drive.
Each side could be driven by one motor with a third motor controling a fifth wheel. I dont have any diagrams currently but there are many videos of h drives on youtube, as it is a common drive type.
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A two-wheeled mecannum drive should work, so long as they were aligned with the center of mass. If they were away from the CoM, strafing would not work well. Not sure what you would do with the 3rd motor though. And if there is nothing for it but drive, then H drive would be a better choice as @rayroy1103 noted.
If you wanted a omnidirectional drive with 3 motors you should do a H or Y drive
If you wanted to be fancy you could use a transmission to have the third motor control the strafing.
Or you could just do H-drive. (Just do H-drive).
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As I see it you have two options. You could do a 3 motor H drive, or if you are planning a 3 motor drive because of your already existing motor distribution you could do a 3m drive with all wheels in line with each other.
A mecanum drive needs one motor on each of the four wheels to be able to strafe. If you have 3 motors an H-drive would be the way to go.
Aside from this, you would probably not have enough power because mecanums act like traction wheels when turning as they have to be dragged which takes a lot of force.
Last year we had and 8 motor 1:1 turbo mecanum drive which worked great when driving forwards and backwards but overheated in ~10s when turning due to having to drag the wheels.
A 2 motor 200rpm V5 mecanum drive would have roughly (240/200)*2.5/4 =0.75 of the torque of our 8 motor turbo cortex drive which would certainly cause the motors to overheat.
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Also Just to clarify ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO A 2 M mecanum drive why is this agruement still a thing
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OK, yeah, I see you are right. Sorry I said it.
You could do this actually, you can do 2m mechanum on one side and then one motor chaining 2 omnis on the other
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Works extra well if your opponent has a bad case of OCD.
Works really badly if your driver has a bad case of OCD
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Can someone make that?
If you are after just the ability to move forward/backwards/translate/spin, build a Kiwi drive:
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What did u make this in?
but won’t this offset result in unbalanced forces on either side of the robot?
I seriously would hate such a lopsided powered design. The left side will not just be slower, but have more torque than the right side. If you can program the mess out of the design it will be possible to make the robot drive straight via motion profiling with this design, but holy crap that’s a lot of work to save one motor (But I can see the advantages of it). I would rather just suggest doing a 3 motor H-Drive using omni-wheels in my opinion.
2D autocad. Just a file with 2D blocks of vex parts.