pic: Team 1511 Prototype Drivebase Mk. II

[ThunderousPrime]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I've seen dozens of teams and robots with pocketed bellypans and no plastic sheet underneath that did not have any issues with this sort of thing at all. I don't think pocketing a belly pan is a bad idea - debris is rarely coming from straight up underneath your robot.

Just to be clear our belly pan does have a piece of corrugated plastic as the surface where we mount our electric and pneumatic components.



This is a picture of the first iteration of the drivetrain which is described in more detail in this thread.

We have discussed doing 4 plates instead of the whole belly pan dropping. Part of the reason why we tried the belly pan idea was that we wanted to see if more surface area of the tread on the belly pan created more friction. The laws of physics says that SA shouldn't matter but that applies to 2 flat surfaces rubbing against each other, not carpet and bumpy wheel tread.