Brown out / breaker trips with Pneumatic Tires

[Chris Mounts]

Today we we're testing driving over the defenses with a KOP chassis + pneumatic tires. We kept having the radio reboot when we'd get stuck. At first we thought we just had a loose connection somewhere but after more testing we figured out we we're browning out.

We think what might be happening is that in some situations the belts get pinched. With the belts pinched they can't skip on the gears and the 4 CIMs end up fully stalled.

Since we can engineer our way around getting the belts pinched we moved on in testing. Our next test was pushing full power into a wall. We almost insistently popped the 40a breakers on the motors. This is better than dropping power to the radio but is still a problem.

A few more pieces of info; we had rather old 40a breakers in that had been tripped many times in the past. Replacing them with new breakers seems to have helped some. We also had the robot up to around 140 lb. for testing. We had no issues when it was just the drive-train and battery.

My question is, has anyone else experienced similar issues with the pneumatic tire setup?