Friction, traction, torque - oh my...

[Gary Dillard]

I just caught your post - If you can wait a little while I'll clean up the whole answer and put it here. Anyone who saw the national finals is aware of the power, speed, traction, etc. of our little robot - thanks to 4 years of development of the drive train. Gary Jones - our drive train "Guru" - and I have been slowly putting together a paper that explains this and we would like to share it with the FIRST community. It's very detailed, based on theory, test data (including the pull test platform at nationals last year), and competition results that correlate pretty well. I guess your question was what I needed to get off TDC and actually finish it.

A few teasers till then:

It's all about power, not torque.
If you stall the motors before you slip the treads, you WILL burn them out.
Minimize friction losses in the drive train to minimize power loss.
The best traction we found is VERY expensive, but second best is pretty close and pretty cheap.
Believe it or not, f really does = uN (more or less) and carpet is indeed a surface.