Thread: Brakes
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Unread 15-04-2006, 13:24
Ben Piecuch Ben Piecuch is offline
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Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Jun 2001
Rookie Year: 2000
Location: Providence, RI
Posts: 336
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Re: Brakes

We, Team 228 have a brake on the front of our bot. It was pretty much a requirement as we're using 4wd with AM Omni's on the front. It's a fairly straight forward design, which uses a pneumatic to push a pad down onto the carpet.

If I remember correctly, it's a 4" throw, 1.5" diameter running at a full 60psi. The pad is about 1.5" x 4" long, with Roughtop belting over the entire patch. Because of the sideloads we anticipated, the friction pad is mounted to two extra shafts running in parallel to the pneumatic shaft, which will take most of the impact loading. These shafts are fed through two mounting plates and slide on bronze bushings.

The entire assembly weights in at about 4 lbs, but we had extra weight which we wanted to put low on the robot anyways. Most of the weight comes from the shafts, which are all 1/2" steel, about a foot long a piece. If we were weight critical, we would have used a much shorter throw pneumatic. This would have greatly cut down on the side loading, and allowed us to use aluminum shafts instead, or even just the pneumatic itself.

Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures. And, since it was pretty much built on-the-fly, we don't have any sketches of it either. It worked well enough to keep us positioned, unfortunately we had more trouble with our ball delivery system.

BEN