Quote:
Originally Posted by dlavery
** although, this does cause one to think about a great idea for an alternate off-season competition - having a competition to see who can drive the longest / farthest with their official FRC robot on a single battery charge. How many laps can you do around an official 1/4-mile running track with one battery? What can you do to your drivetrains to make them as power-efficient as possible for this test (rather than as fast or as powerful as possible)? Given all the recent interest in "green" projects, this could be kind of interesting.
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That's kind of what we did BEFORE getting tied up in this robot stuff...
this youtube video starts with our electrathon car (in blue), doing hot laps on the Vancouver Indy track with the camera mounted on the car built by our good friends and neighbours from Gladstone Secondary (well known in the FTC world last year and VRC world this year). It then goes on to some footage from other races around the Vancouver area.
The cars run on a 1hp DC motor running at 24 volts from two 40amp-hour deep cycle gel cells. The race was one hour long (including two driver changes) and... in our high school category, you needed to go around 40 km to win, depending on the track and driving conditions. Peak speeds were in excess of 50km/h, which doesn't sound that fast until your butt is three inches off the ground on a tricycle with no suspension held together by student welding. Okay... the teachers inspected the welds, especially on the safety cage... we weren't INSANE... it just felt like it. If you look up some of the "open" class racers, 80km+ is quite doable with a similar set up. I think there are a few of the Hawaii FRC schools who compete at a fairly high level in Electrathon... there must be others, too.
HOWEVER.... this sort of concept COULD be applied to FRC. Teams could be limited to two (or three, or whatever) competition batteries, to be stored on the playing field at the beginning of the competition, and returned to the battery storage facility after each match. Teams would choose which battery they wanted to use for which match, and teams qualifying for elimination rounds would be allowed one (or two) additional fully-charged battery.
Power management would become a huge part of the competition... do you REALLY want to burn amps in a pushing match in the first qualifying round? Do you REALLY need to keep your intake rollers running ALL the time, or do you build sensors so they only come on when needed? Do you REALLY want a 150 pound machine, or would you rather build a 100 lb machine? And maybe you'd rather run the pneumatic system at 60 psi rather than 120?
How do you optimize the efficiency of your machine so that you can play hard at the beginning of qualifying, but not drain your power supplies for the last matches... and in elims... if you burn amps to win in the quarters, will it come back to haunt you in the finals? How do you keep track of which battery to use next?
Oh my goodness... this
would be an interesting switch-up. Even more interesting than the low-friction surface this year.
Jason