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Re: Big Minibots
As a famous engineer likes to say, design is an iterative process. I've visited the pits of a few teams* that began by building larger, heavier minibots, and evolved their designs toward smaller, lighter minibots. The physics is the same, but the numbers (weight, friction, wheel diameter, gear ratio) are different. Lighter = faster, after you get the design optimized.
*One of those teams has a leader who is also a physicist, and a teacher. I am certain she did not do the design for them, but I am also certain she did not allow them to believe their first design was good enough. The advantage of understanding the physics behind an engineering problem lies in knowing how to predict the theoretical best-case result -- after you have that knowledge, iterate until your actual result is so close that further effort is better spent on something else.
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Richard Wallace
Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
 since 2003
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)
Last edited by Richard Wallace : 20-03-2011 at 17:11.
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