So we’ve gotten very comfortable with programing with omni-wheels with tracker-wheeless-voltage-controlled odometry but being able to strafe during auton can be very very useful. So I know that mechanum wheels work fundamentally different than omnis with the weird vectors, would these vectors potentially mess up the program? Could we fix it by adding back tracker-wheels? Or do we have to make a new program?
Thanks!
If I’m correct (I don’t use mechanum wheels) the third wheel should be accurate during mechanum maneuvers. Someone has used mechanum wheels to do some pretty interesting curves with an odometry system, so I assume it would work. Here is the post.
The tracking wheels don’t care about how the robot is moving, but if you want to be accurate during mechanum movements, you will need 3 of them. 2 facing forward, and 1 additional one to determine strafe.
The more difficult part is using the position data to actually move properly. I used 3 PID loops (2 for x/y, 1 for turn) and combine their results.
If you do not plan on strafing in autonomous, I believe your code will transfer pretty seamlessly to mecanums.
However, because of a prevalence of wheel slippage in vex mecanum wheels, it is difficult to code strafing without external sensors. If you plan on strafing, you will most likely need either a gyro or three tracking wheels.