My team is going to be changing our drive to mecanum for state. I was wondering if it would be better to use speed or torque internal gears for the motors for NBN?
Honestly if you run torque the drive will be really slow, like really slow. I know this from experience albeit you are slow but no one can push you around cause your toque is quite high in comparison to other robots. I haven’t tried speed gearing on my drive just because I like to be able to push anyone around.
We have a mecanum drive on one of our robots. We first started with a 1:1 drive internally geared for torque and we realised it was way to slow for a field robot. We have now changed the drive internally for speed and have had no issues with it stalling etc.
With the speed internal do you have problems controlling the direction of the base and are you still able to push other robots?
I would not recommend using a meccanum drive for a field robot as they are usually slower… Our robot could run circles around a meccanum drive with even speed internal
I would agree with this. Mecanum wheels are very poor in VEX because of their weight and friction.
Be wary of the torque sacrifice of mecanum. If you gear any higher than torque (even 1:1.6) it will stall very easily if someone pushes you for more than a second or two. Honestly, you don’t need mecanum as much this year as you did during toss up. I’d stick with a straight drive on smaller wheels geared up a little bit.
We use a mecanum drive on our robot right now with direct drive, internal high speed motors, and I can tell you, it makes a huge difference in speed. It hasn’t stalled for us yet, but if you have access to other wheels, I recommend choosing something other than mecanum. We were going to change our base, but due to the lack of parts and money in our club, we had to stick with the mecanum wheels for now. If you are going to be a base shooter, high speed mecanum drive should work fine for you, but if you plan on fielding a lot, definitely do not choose mecanum.
Because almost all teams are gearing for speed, using 4 omnis, or x-drives, a direct drive with internal speed gearing or even turbo in many cases will have enough torque to outshove most robots. we use direct with internal speed because torque would be waaay to slow in this game, but still enables us to play defense effectively.
Now that I’ve seen this thread, I am considering switching from mecanum wheels to regular wheels. We have had problems with our mecanum drive stalling since we have it on high speed. Thanks for all the info!