If you have used mecanums, please post a response and tell me how they worked for you or your team.
Sincerely,
spartin
Our team, 4886a, used Mecanums on our Gateway robot for almost the entire season, except for our first meet. Mecanums work really well, but if you want to be able to strafe and your using 393’s you need the torque mode if your really heavy. We were using high speed mode so we didn’t get the strafing. Also, whenever we got pushed sideways, our motors would die because of the 2 movements of the wheels at the same time. This is why we switched to omnis and a traction wheel in between them for worlds.
1437x, the wall-eating wallbot from the Math division, used mecanum wheels with great success. We were able to put a very large number of motors on the drive (between four and eight, depending on the day, reverse-geared 1:2) because the design had excess features that we didn’t really use and could be removed. Therefore, we could strafe very well despite being (intentionally) and had a lot of torque.
This was probably poor engineering on our part, but our robot would ALWAYS strafe in a rainbow shaped direction. We tried troubleshooting this issue for a very, very long while, and eventually just went back to standard tank drive.
We used mecanums on our robot. It worked very well. always seems to strafe perfectly (except while using the half speed function). It was nice with our wings to block off areas.
The mecanums for gateway were very useful. We used them through the second half of the year and they helped greatly. They kept us from getting pushed around, and they also allowed us to center around the goals instead of backing up and turning to line up straight, that was a major issue with traction wheels on the robot. but we didn’t want to use all omnis because of getting pushed, so we put mecanums on and we got major advantage out of everything.
The mecanum wheels we used were a bit bigger than the VEX ones…
They worked as advertised, but it took quite a while for the driver the gain sufficient driving experience to take full advantage of them. Their most significant advantage over other wheels was not their omni directional drive ability, but rather their “cool” factor.
The VEX mecanum wheels seem to be very well machined, however… I have some students working with them now and they are quite pleased with them.
Jason
We have our custom machined mecanum wheels we used that were 2 inches in diameter and they worked exceedingly well at worlds and they never broke and strafed just as well as i needed them to.
pics?
vids?
We’ve used them on FRC robots for years. Once you get the programming to work - and this can be tricky - they rock. VERY fast and maneuverable.
The wheels are basically the same design as the green eggs design but i made mine with a mill and lathe to fit a tighter tolerance
Do you think you can post a video/pictures of your mecanum wheels? I’m sure we would all like to see them and how they were made.
I have pics posted on this thread
Thanks! (10 Char.)