Which drivetrain do you think would be best for me? I have 1 year of robotics, but I have build a very good drivetrain that helped us get to the state competition. Do you think we should build a Tank drive (like last year) or an X-drive this year? Thanks a ton!
I’ll be honest. I didn’t actually vote on the poll, but mostly because it depends on what your driver and what your team wants out of a robot. Both drivetrains are good, but you have to use your experience and your teams experiences with drivetrains to answer this question. Know the advantages and disadvantages of each before you build one, or even build both and test them out. Don’t use just the poll to decide which one to build.
If you’ve only done robotics for one year, then I would suggest going with a tank drive. X-drives are difficult to build and program even for experienced members.
Have you considered a Mecanum drive (if you have the wheels)? They are not as popular in recent games as they once were (for several reasons), but they do combine good traction with holonomic ability. I’m guessing that you will see more of them this year than in the past 5 years. Maybe add them to the list of considerations that you discuss in your notebook or experiment with.
(One of my teams already has a basic Mecanum drivebase built and coded for testing… we have only been back from worlds for about 4 days.)
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve heard here on the forums that the Mecanum may or may not be very good this year, but most people are leaning towards not. My team’s driver is not very good, so I was thinking of doing the tank drive, but I’ll just continue looking for options.
I was also told that a drop-center drivetrain might be good for not getting pushed around.
The X-drive honestly looks pretty simple to build.. It’s really just a curved tank drive without having to worry about gear ratios, or am I wrong?
its fairly easy to build, but programming is where you might run into problems. I’d say if you have a coder who is willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to code it, go for it, X-drives are fun. (I may be bias towards x-drive, as my team almost always does some kind of omni-directional drivetrain)
My team is doing a tank drive, mainly for having a good balance of speed and torque.
X-drives are a lot of fun. We keep one together just for demos and playing around (and it is educational). However, there really is no built-in support in the basic coding platforms. It’s not too tough to code driver control (even in blocks), but there are no drivetrain templates that make it easy to turn a set # of degrees or drive a set distance. Autonomous functions take more coding experience and odometry techniques… but perhaps the AI vision sensor and April tags could help.
That said, though, I had a team of seniors use Mecanum back in 2021 for Change Up. They competed in remote skills (by webcam) and eventually earned their division’s Build award at Worlds. They coded exclusively in block code. They were going to transition to text, but with the messed-up Covid year, they decided to stick it out in blocks. Lots of functions and broadcast signals, but it worked well for them.
I have said it before and I will say it again. X-Drive is not your best option, especially if you are a newcomer. X-Drives are hard to build, hard to build on top of, and hard to program. Additionally, because of the way that the motors are set up, the drivetrain will get around half of the pushing power of a tank drive drivetrain with the same motors. If you are ADAMANT that you want strafing, go for mecanum or H-Drive. This year, I have been advocating for mecanum more, as the aspects of it that are usually downsides have kinda turned into upsides this year, with it being necessary to have some weight on your chassis so that you don’t tip.
Got it. Either way, aren’t X-Drive and Mecanum very easy to push around because of the wheels?
I’m actually not sure about mecanum. I would eager that it isn’t easy to push because of how heavy the wheels are, but I don’t know. But yes. Do not use X-Drive.
The programming is the difficult part. It’s just a pain since you need to rewire your brain to switch away from tank drives.