pic: 971 Friction Clutch Transmission Insides

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

...but it is EXTREMELY cool.

Thanks! We think so as well. Brian, one of 971's students, really took the idea and ran with it, making it what you see now.

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

Travis, Austin and co., a job very well done. This is a really cool little clutch. Are you guys feeling good about trying to implement it this upcoming season? (Assuming shifting makes sense for the game).

As Roger said, the gearbox took a lot of time to machine. If we had sponsors lined up to help with it, we would seriously consider using it during the season. If we were to need to smoothly disengage power to something like a kicker in 2010 or 2008, we would consider using a similar design.

We can do all sorts of really cool things with the transmission that I would never try with a dog transmission. We were able to shift from high to low gear while traveling at top speed. The neat part about that was that you could hear the CIMs spin up to above their free speed and 'engine brake' the robot back down to low gear top speed.

That being said, this project taught us a lot about what is really important in a drive train and brought into question a lot of things we had assumed were known. We are now beginning to model things better and start to optimize for what we have just learned is important. Most of the algorithms developed for this transmission have already made their way back into the code for our dog shifters, and we will most likely pick different gear ratios next year. I consider this project a success just because of that.