[pujan824]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

Okay, here is what I think is going on. You have effectively have really really under inflated tires which is giving you an enormous CoF. When you go over defenses, you NEED your tires to slip with respect to the ground (at least some of them) in order to roll because your tires are actually covering different distances but with such strong connection to the ground, the motors are having to work their electrons off just to make the wheels roll at all.

As to the 9V when you are just on carpet, this is not turning right? If it is turning and you have not lowered the center wheels as you have said, then this is just normal behavior, but if it is going straight, then it could be that your pool noodles are not consistent and as a result they give you different circumferences for each wheel. Again, with such a high CoF, your motors are busy turning electrons into heat just due to these variations in wheel circumferences.

What to do?

Well, put your robot up on blocks and see what the current draw is. It might be that you have losses generally that are causing you to start in a current hole to begin with. Look for tight belts, sticky bearings, mis-aligned axles, something rubbing against the wrong bit of a bearing (you want your wheel's thrust load to go into the inner race of the bearing not the outer race or the shield).

Assuming you can get the off the ground current to something manageable, then it is time to get real about wheels. 6 wheel drive with these tires and no rock from lowering the center wheel is a slow motion train wreck. You have to fix that. Go back to air on the center tire and over inflate that tire, put some tape over the front or rear (or both) wheels) to make them less grippy, switch to another wheel style for the front or back (or both) wheel, figure out SOMEWAY to give yourself some rock in your chassis.

Good luck...

Dr. Joe J.

Thanks so much. We will be busy all day fixing this right before bag and tag tomorrow. We are thinking of replacing one of the wheels for a smaller one to get the rock and taping them. But putting the tube back in and inflating is not an option. The tubes we have pop way too easily. We already popped 3 when going over defences