pic: 20's IRI Carnage

[apples000]

Originally Posted by KrazyCarl92

My thought was that electrical braking would not even begin to approach the load demands of a full forward-full reverse transition, so the shock loading from that would be negligible in comparison. That's just a thought experiment though, not supported by any evidence.

While I agree that this makes sense, we actually found the opposite. When we had a drivetrain where the wheels moved in an arc up and down (to go over a bump), we found that we bent aluminum axles/joints/#25 sprocket teeth way more often when we were in break mode. This makes no sense to me, but it's what our team experienced.

This is just a thought, but we may have implemented a ramping effect on the drive motor outputs to limit acceleration and prevent tipping, which may have made the full forwards to full reverse a little bit less drastic. We may have also had a linear approximation of drive voltage vs speed, and would limit the drive output to being plus/minus 40% of the approximation. This made sure that if we were being pushed forwards at a high speed, the motors could only go down to 60% power, instead of 100% reverse. It also had the effect of maintaining traction in low gear.