pic: 1717 in the Finals

[LBseale]

Originally Posted by roboticWanderor

along with the energy chain, what reason(s) did ya'll use toothed belts throughout your robot? and what design elements did you have to change to work with or around them? I noticed there is an idler wheel on every length of belt, is this what tensions the belt? could you have gone with thinner and less bulky belts in some places?

In the past we have used chains exclusively, but have grown tired of the pain of tensioning them. You can tension a chain when you put it on, but it stretches out and you have to retension it. Not having an elegant solution to this problem that we could design for, we decided to try belts this season.

The belts turned out to be a great idea. They never change in length, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that, once they are in, you never have to touch them again. The curse is that it can be difficult to get the right spacing between pulleys. This problem was easily solved for us by Solidworks' belt feature, which allows you to find out the distance between pulleys given a fixed belth length. Using this, we could use belts on the whole robot.

The idler wheels on the drivetrain are indeed for tensioning, and they serve to give the belt more surface contact with the drive pulleys for a more robust system. The ones on top give the turret a greater range of motion, since the belt is just riveted to the lazy susan.

I guess we could have gone with thinner belts, but they wouldn't have been as strong. We chose this pitch type because it allowed us to make the spacing in the wheel module as tight as possible, then used it throughout the robot.

In the end, never having to break and tension chain has been great. The computer modeling makes using more modern power transmission much easier. This is also the quietest robot we have ever built, without the clank and clatter of metal chain on metal sprockets.