How do you design a robot that doesn't brownout?

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

Perhaps we'll write a general battery monitor class that tracks the voltage and total-current over time so we can track battery health as well as provide the needed info for brownout management.

This is a great idea, and I recommend it to any team that has the time to implement it. I've done this in the past (2012 and 2013) and you can learn a lot about your robot and batteries by watching what happens to voltage over time. Pretty soon you'll have a pretty good idea of what nominal should look like on your robot, and be able to spot anomalies (bad batteries, binding transmissions, damaged motors) just from looking at the data.

Actually implementing an intelligent load-shedding algorithm is pretty tricky to do - you don't have that much time or voltage overhead before the built-in load shedding kicks in, and depending on your robot's particulars there may not be that many things you can safely shed without affecting your ability to play the game. But just knowing what the general profile of energy usage looks like will give your drivers a great intuition for which "button combos" are okay and which aren't.