Save the Gearbox, Save the Game

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

This is a great way to try and prevent your own robot from damaging your Banebots transmissions, but, as mentioned, it does not protect from outside forces, so be wary.

This is quite true. However, the difference in shock load imposed by an impact by another robot, vs. that imposed by a sudden direction reversal of a motor, seems to me to be about an order of magnitude different.

Let's say your robot is driving forward, and another robot hits yours head on. There is no direction reversal at the DD joint. Now let's say your robot is driving forward slowly, and it is hit from behind by another robot. There is a direction reversal at the DD joint, but also the impact at the DD joint is softened considerably by some things. These include the fact that the other robot will share it's momentum with yours, so that it must accelerate the mass of your robot, and this takes time and absorbs energy. Also the load will be distributed among more than one wheel/transmission, so it is not all concentrated at one point. And there is some give in the chain drive system, assuming you are using a chain drive.

In a sudden motor reversal situation, the inertia of what's connected to the transmission output shaft is higher than the inertia of the transmission gears/motor armature, and there is also a large torque multiplication and speed reduction supplied by the transmission. From the instant the motor changes direction, it can turn quite a ways at full torque as it takes up the slack in the transmission gears (and DD joint), and it can gain a considerable amount of rotational inertia before it finally slams the DD joint against the other side. From the pictures of damaged plates, it looks to me like this is what is causing the problem.


I really would like to see the results of some driving tests on DD joint wear with software motor acceleration control. I think it might be more helpful than some folks realize.