[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by Gregor

What makes a gear drive more durable, easier to maintain, or better at pushing than chain or belt drive?

To answer your questions in order...

What makes a gear drive more durable?

• It completely eliminates the problem of breaking a chain or belt, and, in my experience, we've never had a gear break on a gear drive.
• Throughout 3 districts this year the only maintenance our geardrive required was replacing worn wheel tread, which was typically done between events. Also after our last competition, we re-examined the drive to find that aside from a bit of dirt, the gears had virtually no wear.

What makes a gear drive easier to maintain?

• Changing out wheels (to replace worn tread or otherwise) is substantially easier as there is no need to fight with tensioners, just pull the shaft out (which in our case requires pulling one pin) and the wheel drops out the bottom of the drive.

What makes a gear drive better at pushing?

• Better pushing depends more on the particular implementation of a geardrive. In our case we utilize gears to allow us to have a lot of wheels (12) on the drive system, this combined with the arc pattern of the wheels and a two speed gearbox with a very low low gear (~3fps) allow our drive to maintain maximum traction during a pushing match. In two iterations of using this type of drive we've never found a single robot that we could not block or push, and in many cases its possible to push multiple robots at once.
• Though not as critical as the features above, a well build gear drive also has less friction than many (but probably not all) chain drive systems making it slightly more efficient.