Has anyone (competitively) used a kiwi drive robot for vex iq?
Wondered myself
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Im going to make a forklift kiwi drive for this years game. I hope it works!
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Excellent. Good luck and show pics, vids please.
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Can you please explain a little more of what is meant by kiwi drive and forklift kiwi drive?
Kiwi drive is a cute name for a 3 wheeled omni-directional robot you’ll find on the page of IQ robot builds.
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Thanks. Interesting idea. That would be cool to see it combined with some scoring functionality.
happened to see this post on Chief Delphi a few days ago.
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/mecanum-vs-poor-mans-mecanum/359594/10
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iv seen people compete with holonomic drive in ringmaster and a few older games than that but they have never bean the meta but they did okay because in iq you have the pesky 6motor limitation so you only have 2 motors left for your lift system but in this years game you probably just want somthing stupid fast but youll need to have enoughf motors 2 make at least 2 intakes one for balls and one for cubes.
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The 6 motor limit does require the students to do a lot of creative thinking and figuring out where they can compromise…
2 motors for drive train, minimum
Some mechanism for getting the balls to the top of the cubes (1 or 2 motors)
Some mechanism for lifting cubes to platforms (1 or 2 motors)
Possibly a mechanism for inverting the 2 green cubes that start “upside down”
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yes but where in that configuration can one spar 3 motors for a kiwi drive or 4 for a holonomic it requires a lot of passive mechanisms and creativity
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I could see
3 motors for Kiwi or “H” Style drive
1 motor for some kind of lift to get balls onto the cubes
1 motor for a mechanism lifting cubes with balls
1 motor for manipulating cubes
The above would require some careful work, but I think could be done. Personally I’d give up the maneuverability and only use 2 motors on the drive train, but it’s not my robot 
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i would also dis the manuverability and just gear the drive train at like 3 to 1 but my first year in iq i built a monstrosity in ring master that had 5 motors on the drive train and it won a tournament and got us the create award i just now rememberd that and feel like a hypocrite critisizing u all wth your 3 motor chassis but looking back on it i have no idea what i was thinking
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It has kiwi drive and a forklift with a grappler for picking up balls and cubes at the same time.
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define forklift r you using a 4 bar dr4b dr6b what also keep in mind you may never go above 15 inches even after the start of the match
Ok, here’s my 2 cents. Im not in Vex IQ, but would it not be possible to make a holonomic drive with three motors just like many VRC teams do would. You would have a center wheel facing perpendicular to the rest of the drive train that controls the srafing. I believe @ChrisR246 said this as well.
Again, im in VRC so I would not know the exact nuances of such a drive for IQ.
3 wheels…
From post near top of thread.
One on left moves well, haven’t tried adding lift or changing drive dimensions. Yet.
The official “Kiwi” (downloads PDF) build not durable for us, needed modifications.
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yes I have. well my friend has. it was actually decent, and they won the tourney.
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I am not talking about a base that has three sides all facing 120° away from each other (each side containing a wheel and a motor), although I completely understand how my badly worded post could confuse someone to think that. I am talking about how VRC teams would have a center wheel based on the center of mass of their robot completely separate from the 4 outer powered wheels used for traditional tank-like movement. This center wheel faces perpendicular to the rest of the wheels to provide side to side movement of the robot.
Im very aware of the traditionally triangle shaped “Kiwi Drive” in vex IQ and aware of the same in vex VRC, both of which tend to be poor designs for the base of a competition robot.
I hope this clarifies my previous post.
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Have seen that referred to as “H-drive”, has 5 motors; OP thread title “Kiwi” is 3. (Can you do H-drive with 3 motors?) So holonomic discussion now. X-drive, etc…
Still, want to see what @NoLan comes up with!
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