I’m thinking of experimenting with flex wheel wheels. What do you think?
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I don’t see them having many good applications as actual wheels. The roller resistance of them compared to normal wheels is probably quite high, leading to less efficiency. Normal wheels have plenty of traction for most applications, so the only real use for flex wheels as actual wheels is perhaps for climbing obstacles. Having a flex wheel for the middle wheel of a 6 wheel drive could be good at climbing something like the platforms in turning point.
But yeah you definitely don’t want to have them for the front and back of your drive since the compression and rolling resistance of these wheels will really reduce the efficiency of your drive and really wreck your turning ability.
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That’s true but they might have been helpful in the sumo(turning point).
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They could be quite useful if you were building a swerve drive, but those are very tricky to build and generally not worth it in vrc.
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what about 6 wheel drive with omni wheels outside and in the middle a flex wheel.
maybe… only problem is that Flex wheels come in 4, 3, 2 inch sizes, whereas omni wheels come in 4, 3.25 inch, 2.75 inch. You probably will have problems with them being high centered on the flex wheel or the flex wheel not touching the ground, unless you use 2.75 omnis and 3 inch gray flex wheels, but the high flex will lead to low efficiency and probably slow you down. May be worth testing, though.
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rubber bands could be used to space it out
using flex wheels to support the robot is bad because the flex wheels get squished as they rotate, which takes force that you don’t get back. So it requires more force to move a robot using squishy wheels than it does to move a robot with rigid wheels.
The only time I see it being useful is if you put it in the middle of a 6 wheel drive. this way the flex wheel doesn’t get compressed much if at all, so it doesn’t have high rolling resistance. you could also have the middle wheels elevated slightly so that it doesn’t normally contact the ground unless you’re climbing a pipe or a platform. But really a locked omni or traction wheel can do this job well enough, and the large size of flex wheels probably makes them a worse choice.
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Okay, but the 50A flex wheels are strong. and the more wheels you have the more the weight is spread out.
VEX does not sell 50A Flex Wheels.
The flex wheels get a lot less flexible if you fill the air gaps, and depending on what you use to mount them, you can stretch them out a decently large amount. You could easily make a 3" flex wheel work with 3.25" omnis this way.
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On a side note…
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Thats fire! But isnt it FTC
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Sorry I meant 40 … I think
I believe they are sold in 20A (light gray), 40A (dark gray) and 60A (black).
Oh oops then 60A is the best option for a wheel
someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure adding more wheels will not decrease the net rolling resistance.
I mean it doesn’t hurt to try new things, but flex wheels will not be better than a classic 4 omni or a 6 wheel with locked omni in the middle configuration for most games. If there is some kind of climbing challenge, flex wheels could work as the middle wheel, but chances are if flex wheels work, locked omnis will work too.
I might be better at climbing