Our team is working on our first season with swerve drive, and have just begun testing with our newest iteration. On our previous iteration, there were no issues with the wheels or gears after preliminary testing. The most recent swerve drive version, with new wheels and such, after a few minutes of testing, there was a clanking sound in the wheels. We shut the robot down and began disassembling the wheels from the gears to get to the gear connection. Within there, we found fluff and shreds from our carpet stuck in the gears, which was making it grind. Has this happened to any other teams? If so, how did you solve it? Is it just a matter of disassembling the wheels after every match? Is there a way to prevent debris from getting in swerve drive wheels?
We have a similar issue with MAXSwerve, however the carpet doesn’t stop any movement and just gets stuck around the axle of the bevel gear pinion. We just cut it out occasionally.
Some pictures of your swerve drive would be great to know more about it.
You should check your carpet for loose threads/fibers along all the edges. Edges have a tendency to fray after being cut and it’s easy to get pretty long fiber strings caught by a wheel and wrapped up. Make sure all your carpet seams are taped over generously and that the tape hasn’t been pulled up by rapid stops or starts right over a piece of tape. Fraying also needs to be controlled or covered on the outer perimeter of your carpet if there is any chance that the robot could get to the outer perimeter. You could tape the carpet to the floor or just use tape as “binding” by wrapping it over the outer edges.
I’ve never seen “fluff” bind up a wheel. It’s always been longer fibers. If you have enough fluff to do this, it might be coming from the carpet being destroyed by friction of misaligned wheels scrubbing the carpet rather than rolling nicely over it.
It is possible to 3D print some shrouds that mount on the underneath corners of your drive base and expose just the minimum amount of wheel to allow its axial rotation. Something like this would offer some protection against picking up carpet fibers, but it certainly would not be complete protection. Most teams do not need to do something like this to keep their swerve modules from binding up.
Which modules are you guys running?
Rev MAXSwerve Modules
We’ve definitely had this happen. We usually practice with at least 2 carpets down so we often cross between them and if you don’t tape it down, it gets frayed very easily. We have had the carpet interfere with the driving of the modules and with the bevel gears especially. We just check every so often for carpet and remove it with pliers or flush cutters. This won’t occur at competition because they tape down any area where the carpet is joined or worn down.
Yeah, this totally can happen during practice and it’s a huge pain to clean up. It usually happens due to poor carpet condition or untapped edges that result in fabric loops sticking out for the tread to grab. Since the carpet at events is usually kept in good workable condition, I’ve never seen it happen in a match.
Only thing I can really recommend is to get some good Gaffers tape and cleanly tape all the edges of the carpet down. If there’s any issues with the fabric throughout it such as a hole or fraying area covering those can be a good idea. In our experience the gaff tape is extremely durable and can take a season of robots driving over it without peeling up.
Had this happen to an extreme (robot-immobilizing) degree with our old carpet. Fraying edges and holes create long strings that get slurped right up into the gears. It really hasn’t been an issue on a real field, so really just check your practice carpet and remember to clean the gears occasionally. Cleaning regularly also is a good way to make sure you’re regreasing regularly, which you should be doing regardless of whether anything needs cleaning.
We have seen some success with custom printed shrouds covering the bevel gear side of the wheel. The shrouds at least keep the big hairballs out. Little fibers still find their way in but those shouldn’t be affecting your drive performance, at least over a short period of time, if you were to never clean them out ever you might eventually see some degradation but I think that would take a while (more than a season)
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