Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
In the past you saw robots jumping as they turned corners, drive motors that cut out from the circuit breakers tripping and sometimes smoke pouring out of the motors and you knew, ah, something is less than optimal there. This year there will be none of that. Teams will think, my robot is not hopping as it turns, my motors are not tripping the breakers or even getting hot... ...everything is right with the world.
No such luck.
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I can attest to this in an empirical setting. Last night we ran four types of robots: Light (100 lbs or so) 6WD, Heavy (150 lbs) 6WD, Light 4WD (long & skinny), and Heavy 4WD (long & skinny)
The 6WD turned with relative ease (relative being the key word). It would make zero-turning-radius turns (just spinning around) and arcing turns. Of course, it slid around a bit, but not as much as we thought it would.
The 4WD also turned (which kind of suprised me, based on the math), but looking closer at the wheels as it turned, it was actually skipping across the surface, not sliding like the 6WD had. Our driver (3rd year, I believe) also mentioned it was harder for him to control the turn with the 4WD set up and it was turning slower, which confirmed that it was a skip-turn and not a true skid-turn like the 6WD.
We (234) have a lot of experience with the "dancing robot". Our 2003 robot looked like it was doing the jitterbug while trying to turn, which was scary the first time we saw it, but we learned to drive with it...we just had to take our time.