[Marc P.]

This season our team designed a worm gear drive system. Our sponsor has graciously been helping us with laser cutting and welding many of our components, but they've been very busy the last few weeks, and were unable to finish cutting the motor mounts for the worm drive in time for us to assemble. Our students tried to hand mark, cut, and assemble the mounts, but the alignments were always just a hair off, and the worms would bind up/draw very high current/stall while running under load.

After a few attempts to fix and drive with it, and only a week and a half left before the ship date, we scrapped the worm drive and went back to the reliable kit tough-boxes.

One of the advantages of the worm drive was having the motors tucked away in pockets next to the wheels, with the worms mounted directly to each CIM's output shaft, driving a gear mounted directly on each wheel. Four motors on a four wheel drive system, and no chains anywhere. Many of our other components were designed to occupy all the free space left where chain would be.

With the scrapping of the worm system, and subsequent re-introduction of chain, many things had to be redesigned and rebuilt to fit wherever there was room, around chain and gearboxes.

The odd thing is, the redesigns gave us a second look at what we were doing, and we were able to improve upon many of the original designs. The resulting robot is much more capable than it would have been, and we're really looking forward to competing in New York!