Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil Mack
What changes in the design came as a result of knowing this information?l
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Al's answer is more from an electrical side. From the general robot design side, we found a few key things that year.
We found that we were popping breakers just by driving around. I don't recall the numbers but we were drawing a lot of current. We were using two motor types on our drive system that had been used in previous years (Fisher Price and drill) and the assumption was made that the motor characteristics were the same as before. It turned out that the specs were different for one of the motors and the gearing was insufficient. We found that before ship and were able to fix it.
Another thing that we found from our competition data was that certain combinations of activity caused large current spikes. Once again, I don't remember the exact details, but it was something like we were spiking if we tried to drive with the drop down tank while shooting. This information helped us to train the drivers to use the robot a certain way to do our best to prevent tripped breakers or RC cutout.