paper: 4 CIM versus 6 CIM theoretical calculations

[ThaddeusMaximus]

1. Mechanical power output is not everything. You need to have useful power; proper gearing. However, yes, having more mechanical power output won't hurt.

2. How do you magically draw a hard limit of 200 (or whatever) amps without effecting voltage input to the motors? Though you may be "limited" to 200 amps, when you're drawing this much current, voltage dips due to both surface depletion (?) and voltage drop in the loads to the motors. This shouldn't be ignored. When you drop away from the 12V, the motor curve you use up there is no longer valid.

Look into using kV and kT values to model things and take this voltage drop into account.

[thatprogrammer]

I took a decently quick read and had a few questions.
1. I may be misunderstanding what you are stating here:

4CIM 200/524 = 38%

Are you saying that a 4 CIM drive should be limited to 38% per a motor in order to keep your robot below 200amps of power usage? If so, I think that the 200 Amp number is actually pretty far from the limit of the power system of a modern FRC robot; we have run 4 CIM drives without any voltage ramping and never had any issues with brownouts.*

2. Would limiting the current draw of a motor be similar to limiting voltage? I.e. would limiting max current have a similar effect to limiting a CIM's output to .5 (In terms of limiting the speed at which the CIM will approach maximum acceleration?)

3. Why not simply control the Max RPM of the CIM in code rather than using a current PID?

*I suspect that part of this has been our somewhat low final RPMS from our gearbox reductions. These have both resulted in very short acceleration periods.

Thanks in advance for the answers!

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by thatprogrammer

Are you saying that a 4 CIM drive should be limited to 38% per a motor in order to keep your robot below 200amps of power usage?

He is saying that @ 0 RPMs you need to provide 38% of full voltage to draw 200 amps total. At higher RPMs you will need to provide more voltage to draw the same 200 amps. Similarly you need to provide even less voltage if the robot is traveling backwards initially.

Originally Posted by thatprogrammer

2. Would limiting the current draw of a motor be similar to limiting voltage? I.e. would limiting max current have a similar effect to limiting a CIM's output to .5

Halving voltage halves no-load speed, halves torque, and results in 25% mechanical power. On the other hand, limiting current limits torque and thereby limits acceleration. This by itself is very helpful, even without the power increase that is mentioned in the paper, because it causes robots to be much more stable.

Originally Posted by thatprogrammer

3. Why not simply control the Max RPM of the CIM in code rather than using a current PID?

If you only control velocity, you will still draw high amounts of current at stall. For example, a 4 CIM drive will draw 524 amps at stall, and 1048 amps going from full forward to full reverse. This is what causes brownouts.