Are doubled up wheels effective for battlebots successfully countering defence / defending? Our team didn’t really get pushed around too much this competition, but I was thinking of better ways to push, because head on as well as side on versus high traction wheels we don’t push as much as I would like. Are doubled up wheels a good way to increase the pushing potential of our bot? we would be using a 12 wheel drive(2 omni in front, 2 locked omni in the middle, and 2 omni in the back)
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It might give you more traction but not necessarily more “power.” If possible add more motors to your drive.
Using a V5 bot with four speed motors. The added drive torque added by another motor is not as good as having a descoring bar / ram as well as an intake bar.
This is actually an interesting idea, but extra wheels do not increase your traction at all. Assume your robot weighs 24 units (the actual unit doesn’t matter, I just picked 24 to make the math easier). With 4 wheels, each wheel has 6 units of weight distributed to it, but with 6 wheels, each wheel has 4 units of weight to it. If you have 6 wheels and double them all up, you now have 12 wheels, but each only has 2 units of weight on it. In any case, your overall traction is exactly the same.
To increase your traction, you want to add weight to your robot, make sure all of your wheels are chained together and driven (no free spinning wheels!), and use very grippy wheels. These are the only possible ways to increase your traction.
Good luck!
With the way the foam tiles work, spreading out your weight can actually make you easier to move as it decreases the deformation of the foam.
Our sister team originally had a direct drive with locked omni’s on the front and it had decent pushing power, but then they chained all the wheels together and it increased their pushing power by quite a bit.
It allowed the motors to share power, so if one was slipping or not getting as much grip, the other would gain the strength of the one that was slipping. I’m not sure what your drive is like so I’m not sure if this is valid for you, but it’s my two cents.
we used to have a configuration like that but decided having the smaller spacing was worth more. Now that we’re moving away from that configuration that sounds like a good way to increase pushing power.
We still have a direct drive and can see a clear difference on the way we climb. We can climb pretty well, but we need to be going full power straight on. Our sister team can climb from the corner of the platform at a quarter of their full power easily. We are going to put out a reveal soon, so you’ll be able to see it.
If you had doubled up wheels your chances off falling off the platform would decrease. One wheel could be hanging off, but the other one would still be on it, preventing you from falling off.
that makes sense. Would doubled up wheels effect turning performance? We don’t really intend to park in our matches, because we can have our alliance park while we support them or prevent them from being pushed off