[dtengineering]

There are some excellent papers on transmission designs in the White Papers here on CD. Teams have been very generous in sharing their ideas.

Perhaps one of the things that would be most helpful to teams wanting to build a transmission -- either based on one of these designs or a new one as proposed -- would be a list of components hyperlinked to on-line suppliers. One of the real tricks to building a competitive robot is knowing what parts are available, how much they cost, what their strengths and weaknesses are and where to get them from.

That said, there is still room for innovation and collaboration. An arm transmission integrated with a sensor and PID feedback loop to hold position would be helpful to many teams, I think.

As for the Banebots trannies, yes, there was a lot of concern about them before they received the carrier plate upgrades. Since then they have been at least as reliable as any other transmission. They are ideally suited for direct drive applications, which allows teams to do away with heavy and unreliable drive chains, and are very well designed for adding a very functionional optical encoder for speed and distance measurements.

Jason

P.S. Of course just because there is are existing solutions to a problem does not mean there aren't better ones.