Front or Rear wheel drive for more precise LEGO Mindstorms robot movement? Pro Preview

Our next step in the process of finding the answer how to make the LEGO robots move straight ahead is to discuss front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive. Should the robot be with a front-wheel drive or with a rear-wheel drive to make it more precise, more stable, more predictable. The answer is that a front-wheel drive will probably give you better results but the wheel drive is not the most important thing. In this video tutorial on the LEGO Mindstorms robots we'll do a few experiments to discuss the influence of the wheel drive on the precision of the movement. Here we have the Box Robot and the Five Minute Robot. And the Box Robot is generally with a rear-wheel drive. This means that the wheels are at the back of the robot. And the wheels push the robot forward. How do you build a front-wheel drive? You actually just turn the robot. And now if you decide that this is your front of the robot and when you are moving forward, you should move in this direction then this becomes a front-wheel drive because now the wheels are at the front of the robot and they pull on the robot while they are moving. So, this is a front-wheel drive and this is a rear-wheel drive. And the same applies for the Five Minute Bot. If we think that this is our front, then we have a front-wheel drive but if we just turn the robot and if we now think that this is the front of our robot, then we have a robot with a rear-wheel drive. So, there is nothing special about constructing rear or front. You just have to decide on the direction in which you would like say that your robot will move forward. What we'll do as an experiment in this video is to take the Five Minute Bot and to move with the Five Minute Bot when we have the wheels at the back so as a rear-wheel drive. And it will move in this direction and we'll see the deviation of the straight line. And then we'll take the Box Robot and this Box Robot generally has a rear-wheel drive so we'll just turn it like this and it will move in this direction and again we'll see the deviation from the straight line.

As you could see the robots still make errors. And they still deviate from the straight line even though that we change from front to rear and from rear to front-wheel drive. They still make errors. So, probably it is important for your robot but generally if you have a robot that's well balanced, whether you have a front-wheel drive or a rear-wheel drive should not matter.