About Our Team
Our team is from Bloomington, MN and our focuses are to have fun and develop useful skills from the things we learn, specifically, learn some programming, and start learning how to use Android Studio and getting better at Fusion 360. We have 3 team members: Max, AJ, and Noah. We are all 15 years old and this is our 4th season competing in FTC.
Wheel Design
As you can see in the pictures above, our robot has very unique wheels. There are spikes coming out of the back wheels and the omni-wheels are in a star shape. We 3D printed these wheels ourselves because part of the challenge this year was to get into the warehouse to get game pieces for points. But to get into the warehouse you either had to make a very small robot that could fit between the small gap between the pipes or simply just make your robot able to run over the pipe. We found that the bigger the wheels, the easier the robot could make it over the pipe (obviously), so we started off there. We quickly found that the wheels would often slip and it could be tough to make it over the pipe so we decided to add some little spikes onto the enlarged wheel (as you can see in the final design). We knew there would be lots of torque on the wheels so we made 3 seperate parts of the wheel that squeezed together tightly. The first piece was the one that the axle went through. This was a square with a very high print infill. The second piece was a thin circle that went over that and inside the main-outer wheel. The last piece was the actual wheel where those pieces squeezed into it. This worked extremely well and we used it in a competition and did very well.
Our next concern was that our design wasn't perfect, we could sometimes manage to get stuck on the pipe so we decided to change the front omni-wheels. We used a star shaped pattern similar to the back wheels because we knew that would work. It did work pretty well however the wheels weren't big enough so they scratched the floor mats but that was an easy fix of just making them bigger. Lastly the reason they spin is because we put skateboard bearings in between the the omni wheel. We did this by simply printing the wheel in 2 pieces and leaving a small indent for an axle that the bearing would rest on, and we did that for each leg that stuck out as you can see in the picture. This is our final design and this has worked very well and we have never gotten stuck with this design. In all of this we learned tons of stuff about 3D printing and Fusion 360.