Summer Mecanum Drive
After seeing many successsfully implemented mecanum drivetrains throughout the Velocity Vortex season, we decided that we should try and not only build a drivetrain using mecanum wheels but also program it. We began by simply replacing the stealth wheels that were on one of the old programming bots and used that to test the basics and to get the programming working.
After seeing that run successfully, we began research into the Mecanum version of the TileRunner (we used the standard Andymark Tilerunner in the Velocity Vortex Season). While we liked the Tilerunner, one of its primary assets was the placement of the motors in the bottom center of the bot. One main drawback of the Mecanum Tilerunner was that the motors were on outside edges and connected directly to the wheels via a PicoBox Uno, which is the easiest place to intake field elements and do other parts of the challenge.
Our Solution was to create a drivetrain that was almost identical to the Tilerunner (except made of wood in its first iteration) and simply move the motors to center and use chain to drive the wheels.
