Has anyone experimentally determined the coefficient of friction between the Rover Wheel and the carpet?
I probably can’t our carpet to the lab until the weekend, so if nobody manages to figure this out before then, I’ll try to share our test results.
The floor the the Game is not made of carpet so you would not want to cover your lab in it i don’t think
The border of the field is made of carpet.
yeah
i was wondering the same thing about the rover wheels and the carpet around the edge.
but my question is, with the bumpers and everyone hitting the walls a lot, how will it really affect the teams? because it’s not that much carpet…
It might be something to figure out for other years. With some of the new movement tactics teams are coming up with, maybe the rover wheels would work in next year’s game.
how significant is the differnce between the crater surface and the carpet? I imagine with the rover wheels that they too will slip on the carpet. Maybe not as much but for looking at the wheels I could see them slipping fairly easily as well.
They do slip very easily on carpet. However, carpet is far less slick than the regolith, probably by a two or three to one margin. I don’t have experimental data other than spinning the wheel on the floor with my hand, but I would guess between .1 and .2 coefficient of friction on carpet.
The traction gain is almost negligible.
our raw data:
14lb dynamic (wheels slipping) pull, 60lb robot, 4wd, “smooth/regolith/etc”
16lb dynamic (wheels slipping) pull, 60lb robot, 4wd, “carpet”
that’s an extra 2lb of pull while slipping, and I think the breakaway point is pretty close to 2lb extra as well (16lb smooth, 18lb carpet).
tl;dr: the problem isn’t so much the floor surface as the smooth wheels.