Hey all, I wanted to see if anyone here had good options for actuators that could be used for climbing? I was looking at amazon and found some that I am considering. If anyone has more experiences in this realm could you weigh in.
The product you linked has a listed top speed of 10 mm/s, and in one of the pictures it’s quoted at 5.7 mm/s. That’s going to be painfully slow for a climber.
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I would refrain from linear actuators for the reason Ari mentioned mainly. along with the fact that I’m not sure how robust some model from amazon would be in a possibly intensive task. If you’re already using pneumatic systems on your robot, I would suggest adding 1-2 more tanks and just running pneumatic cylinder climbers. Or, if you have the room, the tried-and-true telescoping arm. If you’re set on using a linear actuator, REV does sell a mechanism kit which can be used with run-of-the-mill FRC COTS components. However, for a climb, you’d likely need some sort of brake, as there is nothing to prevent back driving it.
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My team is likely going to use two REV linear actuators for a mechanism whose purpose is, among other things, to lift the robot during the endgame. We determined that when a REV linear actuator is connected to an unpowered NEO motor through a 180 degree gearbox and a 5:1 MAXPlanetary gearbox, it takes between 60 and 90 pounds of force to cause the linear actuator to backdrive. We figure that with two of these actuators suspending a robot that weighs less than 100 pounds, the robot should remain suspended at the end of the match after power is cut, with no backdriving occurring.
Don’t forget about bumpers and battery in your weights. 120 limit is without those included. Not sure if your bot is still under 100 with those as well
We don’t know the final weight of our robot yet, so fair enough.
It should be possible to mess with the gear ratio of the MAXPlanetary gearbox until the robot consistently stays suspended when power is cut. We don’t want to gear it down too much as we don’t need any extra torque beyond what’s necessary to lift the robot, and extra gearing down means the actuators will move more slowly. So we’ll find a sweet spot.
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In many cases we’ve had a climber with as low as 12:1 but those were attached to a mini-cim and robots somewhere around 100lb with 1 arm.
We have one of these from an offseason project that never got finished. My kids powered it yesterday and said " it is insanely slow and we need to look at a different idea"
Hey @John_Bottenberg , did you end up using two REV linear actuators to climb?
Yes, we did! While I don’t have any close up videos of our climb, the general robot design (including the climber) looks like this:
And here is an example of a match in which we climbed:
To update, progressive automations has many different giving options available on Amazon/their own website. For climbers they may not be the best options. ( I haven’t inspected them all)
But we found a reliable one to use for our angle adjustments. A fair replacement for the non existent darts.
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