Are there any problems with using 6 wheels for a drive (It’s more convenient because we are using 6 motors)?
No, it works great, just takes up slightly more space
As long as you’re not doing any over-geared transmission, you should be fine. Heck, if your robot is featherweight, you can even insert the internal turbo gearing.
A single wheel does not need to have a motor attached to it. You can double or triple up the motors on each of the wheels.
There was some really good work earlier in the summer to show the speed of robots with a motor on each wheel versus chained together versus doubled up. I can’t find it right now. Anyone else remember this thread?
Your turning radius is effected when doing the different types of motor layout though. Chaining had a minor effect but more motors directly tied together was proven better.
Also, I believe that 6 wheels will allow the motors to do less effort to spin, since the robot is supported by even more wheels than 4 wheels. This can be applied to an extent; you don’t want to add way to many wheels.
Think of a bed filled with needles!
Well the torque to spin all the wheels doesn’t change. total torque = wheels * torque per wheel
torque per wheel is relative to the number of wheels so wheels just factors out.
The biggest question is what 6 wheels are you gonna use? 6 wheel all traction is going to be quite poor. I would suggest all omni wheels because you can’t guarantee your center of turning is perfectly along one of your wheels.
Forgive my poor choice of words on the last post. @tabor473 , what I mean to say is that a small portion of the torque generated by the motor is used to compensate the friction and bending on the shaft. While adding additional wheels, the friction in the bearings should decrease. Some of the torque used to compensate can be used to power the wheel.
We have a 6 motor drive, all turbo motors. Theoretically, if we were to add external gears on the wheels to make them go even faster, what would happen? Would the motors burn out?
Depends. Probably at some point you would burn out even now.
Why would we burn out now?
[https://vexforum.com/t/best-drivetrain-for-starstuck-poll/35058/1)
I never got around to building an X-holonomic to test… and now all the parts are tied up in my teams’ builds.