Mecanum power draw issue when weighted down

[Lil' Lavery]

Increase your reduction, significantly. With such a little reduction and 6" wheels, you're putting a large load on the motors, and they're drawing a lot of current to compensate. As a result, you're browning out your control system and/or tripping your 40A breakers (which may be the root cause of you describing your jaguars as "failing"). Additionally, with a large load on the motors, they will spin a slower rate (which is the root of the "CIMs supposedly draw less current at higher RPMs" comment).

I'd highly suggest taking a look at the CIM motor curves and reading some of the great material out there on designing a drive system for FRC.
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...rves_Rev_A.pdf
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1378
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1443

[pfreivald]

We've run mecanum on 9:1, 10.71:1, 12:1, and 12.75:1 reductions. Even at 9:1, the power draw started to get high enough to make us nervous (please don't ask for specifics--this was five years ago and I don't have that kind of memory!)

Our octocanum last year was 10.71:1 on the mecanum wheels and that worked exactly as well as we wanted it to.

So as others said: Gear it down. My suggestion would be a 2:1 (or slightly higher) reduction from what you've already got--either by buying new gearboxes (which will be expensive and probably require a redesign, if they're even in stock) or using belts/chain (which will be much cheaper and definitely require a redesign).