Some people complain that the o-ring tires do not provide enough traction. To address that, I have created a modified wheel, which uses Pololu’s silicone tires. The wheel is a very minor variation of original wheel design; it has the same diameter, so it can be used without making any changes to the rest of chassis.
The design files are available on Printables: Wheel for XRP robot - pololu tires by shurik179 | Download free STL model | Printables.com
PS. This is part of my ongoing project of making a customized XRP robot for my own teaching needs. I am documenting my progress on Hackaday: Customized XRP robot | Hackaday.io
If it is OK with moderators, I will post some updates here - hope it will be useful to other users
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Yes, feel free to post things here. We like lots of ideas and input.
Let us know how much traction difference you get with those treads.
We tried this and it works a lot better than the original tires.
The only issue we ran into is that the wider tires will sometimes rub against the robot frame. Our fix for this was to slightly modify the 3D printed wheels such that the connector that slides onto the motor shaft is a little bit shorter so that the wheel sits a little closer to the motor (and therefore a bit farther away from the robot frame).
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@shurik179 @Debbie386 Could you please share more about your experience with the normal O-ring tires versus the ones from Pololu? I tried these out, and actually measured the Pololu tires to have a lower coefficient of friction than the normal O-rings that come in the kit. I tried a handful of different surfaces, and the Pololu tires always had worse traction. On what surfaces are you using the XRP? Perhaps you could share photos? I’d like to understand why there’s a discrepancy between our results.
We are aware that the XRP’s drive wheels can slip on some surfaces, and it’s something we want to improve, so we need to understand the problem better. We even had our manufacturer send us several samples of different tires with different materials to find the best one, and nothing had better traction than the O-rings in our testing. Since your experiences appear to be different, it would be great to understand why.
Thanks so much!
I’ll try to do some testing and report back.
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I found the stock tires to be just fine when running on a smooth carpet – repeatable drive results. However, at our maker space with uneven, concrete and dusty floors, the results were frustrating - of course. So I’m working on smooth carpet for the most part.
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