A concept I had for climbing the pyramid involves getting power from the drive motors. It’s based on our current climbing concept which I won’t explain beyond saying that it involves 2 wide belts in the shape of a V and are at 45 degrees to the frame. The attached image shows my idea to transfer power from the drive train to the belt. What I don’t have ideas on how to do are the circles with question marks in them. I don’t have an idea on how to transfer power along those angles with enough torque to lift the robot. Thoughts?
The most obvious solution to me would be to use bevel gears. In FIRST, they are often used on swerve drive modules to transfer power from a vertical shaft to a horizontal one. I know they can transfer power at 90 degrees, but I’m not sure if there a bevel gears for a 45 degree angle. Bevel gears have pretty high tolerances though to keep them together. One other option which I don’t know much about would be something like a universal joint (wikipedia or google image search).
One thing I forgot to put in the drawing is that I’m planning on putting a secondary gearbox somewhere on the shaft, as climbing speed doesn’t need to be as fast as driving speed and the extra torque will help with climbing.
Look into Power Take-off systems.
The other option is the universal joint.
A quick google search should show you some examples. Though I will admit I don’t know where you could buy one off hand and its not the simplest mechanism to machine in the world.