Starting to design a robot and wanted to see if anybody has any good ideas!
I actually kind of like the drivetrains from some robot reveals early this season, and I know they mentioned that there’s room for improvement, but I think they’re quite inspiring.
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I would start with your goals for the game. What are your goals for scoring methods? Do you think you could design a drive that can go over the barrier? If so, I’d recommend prototyping ideas around this key capability. Are you planning on driving under the sides? If so, the maximum height there is going to impact every other component. Are planning to climb/hang? If so, understanding the maximum weight limit of your climb mech will define many choices.
A robot is a system of tradeoffs. You cannot just survey other teams to pick the “best drive” or any other component. You have to come up with design priorities and then make other choices to support those.
I have a ton of respect teams that make small proof of concept protos of key mechanisms. Quickly learning about key ideas in your design teaches you a ton about your design. It is so much better than surveying robots on YouTube and picking one to copy/be inspired by.
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look on youtube there are already a bunch of ri3ds and ri24h
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welcome to the forums,
do some of your own research
do some prototyping
build your final drivetrain
wow its almost like vex teams should use the engineering design process instead of asking other people to do all their work for them
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I’ve seen a couple of videos of “Boat Drive” . Basically a drive train with a piece of Plastic that is curved to guide/coast of the rail Ideally tho this should be either all the way across or adding a 6 wheel in between to bridge the gap .
What I was thinking about is going with a Mecanum Wheel Drive, where the motors are on top the wheels to keep the design compact and tight as I want to make a small from factor bot will prove to be useful as if you aren’t going over the barrier it might be useful to go under , I’m also thinking for the end game mechanism adding a lock to prevent the robot from moving down
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