Belt Drive Design Problem

[Travis Schuh]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Re: 9mm versus 15mm belts, it's worth noting when calculating the loading that in a 6-wheel drive train, the center wheels are taking far more load than the front and back ones. I'm much more comfortable running 9mm from a center wheel to the outer wheels in a 6WD than I would be going between center wheels on an 8WD.

While I would agree that on average this is true, I would argue that there can be cases where the outer wheels will be loaded with all of the robot torque, and thus it is appropriate to run the FOS calcs assuming this as worst case. Depending on the height of your CG, you can get significant load transfer to your outer wheels when accelerating. If you accelerate and the robot goes up on its back wheels, then the outer wheels are taking all of the torque (our robot this past year would do this).