Quote:
Originally posted by Matt Leese
I don't mean to belittle your work, but I must comment that during the Maryland State Fair Competition your robot seemed to have more than a little trouble moving. Now, I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the gear box or not but to me they seemed a bit related. So basically I'm wondering what was going on there.
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That's a fair question. As noted above, the problems we were having last weekend had to do with the treads in our drive system. One badly bent flange on a drive sprocket, and the treads worked their way off the sprockets (which were being driven by the gearbox) and jammed up against the sides of the drive system. Once the damage was done, we could never pound the flange back into the original configuration, so it just kept happening over and over again. But the gearbox kept working just fine all the way through. In a way, the problem was exacerbated by how well the gearbox did work - it was providing so much torque in low gear that the fiber belts in the treads were stretching, and that allowed the treads to climb up the flanges and get bound up. By the end of the competition, the treads were so chewed up they looked like they had been dropped in a meat grinder.
It was very frustrating because we knew what was wrong, and how to fix it, but did not have the replacement parts or equipment to effect the repair. So we just had to keep pulling the tread assemblies apart after each match and pounding things flat with a hammer and re-assembling as fast as we could, and then keep our fingers crossed that it would stay together for two minutes. As I said elsewhere, next year we go with WHEELS!!!
-dave