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Comment by ed312 | Hacker News Reader

These are so damn cool. My old FIRST team wanted to use these but the lack of traction was a real problem. Great for moving heavy & slow, not so great for fast turns (even with relatively low center of gravity).

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My FIRST team did use them and loved using them. For our use case it was great

That's awesome! I think the year we considered it was "Aim High" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim_High) or one of the adjacent years. We used our previous year's robot as a test bed and found regular wheels could too easily push our Mecanum wheel robot out of the way / knock it off balance. Do you remember which competition you used the wheels? What did you end up using for a driver control layout?

Same problem we had this year (Power Up). We built two drive bases, and when we tried the Mecanum one against our 2017 robot, it just got pushed right out of the way. No friction.

We used it for Steamworks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Steamworks), where speed was a priority for our light robot. Unfortunately, defense was utilized to our detriment.

Where does one get Mecanum wheels of a size (durability) suitable for robots?

Andymark (http://www.andymark.com/Mecanum-s/53.htm) sells mecanum wheels durable and large enough for some robots.

Thanks. I think I searched years back and came up with very small hobby wheels. It looks like there are a lot more options now.

I played in 2002 -- team 278.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabolical_Dynamics

The field was carpet, and we put treads on the wheels for traction. Our most common problem was blowing our fuse due to using drill motors for the drive train! (Low speed, high torque, high power draw.) But until that fuse blew, those goals moved where we wanted them to!

It was our rookie year this year, and after watching how great some other teams were with mecanum wheels, we decided to look into them over the summer. To be honest, I'm just excited to try driving them :)

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