[Jared]

People don't talk about the acceleration of a drive train because it's difficult to assign a single meaningful number, and people generally don't know what 1 m/s^2 looks like.

A robot's acceleration is proportional to how fast the robot is going. If you're going full speed forward, you will have no acceleration. If you're going half speed forward, you will have half of your acceleration at stall. If your robot is stopped, you experience "full" acceleration. This trend of increasing acceleration continues when you consider a robot that's moving backward and accelerating forward. However, you will eventually reach a point where this relation becomes nonlinear and levels off because the rotor becomes saturated, but we don't have enough information about CIM motors to find out where saturation begins.

These accelerations are also difficult to estimate because you will never actually get the rated stall torque out of the CIM. The internal resistance of the battery, the speed controllers, and all of the wiring/connectors will cause the motor to see less than 12 volts, and draw less than stall current.


Perhaps a better metric for measuring drive train performance would be time to travel a certain distance.