Battery Testing: Our Team would like to share our downloadable study with your team!

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Our team has completed an exhaustive battery testing regiment and in the spirit of FIRST, we would like to share our experience with your team. Teams accrue batteries over time, but which ones are good for competitions? Newer doesn't always equate to performance.

To better understand battery performance in a competition environment, students researched and implemented four industry standards of battery test. They then tested sixteen of the team's batteries with three performance benchmarks. The batteries were then ranked from first to worst and a strong correlation was found between not only battery age but the number of charge and discharge cycles a battery goes through. Finally, an engineering report was written so that other FIRST teams would benefit from our findings.

In the 2014 competition season, our robot had a complete failure during a critical qualifying match while on the field. The team did an in-depth analysis of the failure and the cause was determined to be low battery voltage, which reset the robot’s processor and shut all functions down. This was a surprising finding – as we were using a new battery that was checked before being placed in the robot.

This finding provided the incentive to pursue the following questions:

1. How do we really know how our batteries will perform in a competition?

2. Are there industry standards for battery testing?

3. Can we perform regimented testing and rank our batteries?

4. What are the characteristics of the FIRST lead acid batteries and can we better understand how to measure them?

5. Is there a way to log battery performance while the robot is actually running?

We answered these challenges in this report, and we hope it can also help your team!



http://the-charge.com/uploads/3/3/5/9/3359086/testing_and_analysis_of_first_robotics_batteries.p df