pic: 971 Friction Clutch Transmission



This is a picture of the friction clutch transmission that we did as a 2013 off season project. Our goal was to decrease our shift engagement time and be able to shift under load. The transmissions were used on one of our robots at the MadTown Throwdown and worked without issue.

Looks beautiful, Travis. Good job to everyone on 971 for coming up with this. I’m assuming this uses your strategy of putting the last reduction on the wheel shaft itself, since I don’t see an output shaft coming from the transmission.

Keep up the great work!

Since none of the other 971 folks have gotten around to responding yet: yes, this is a drop-in replacement for the dog shifters we used in 2013. They were able to swap it out on the practice robot in a few hours and had it running very quickly (I think that day, but I wasn’t there so I could be wrong).

As mentioned in the caption, we ran the practice robot with the friction clutches at Madtown and didn’t have to make any other modifications to the robot outside of the transmission. It’s a nice risk mitigation if we decided to use the friction clutch during the actual season, since we could always revert back to the dog clutch if unforeseen problems arose.