We have abkut a 16 pound robot on 3.25"wheels with turbo motors and have no problems with ptc tripping. The tanks really arent that heavy in my opinion. Heavier than a motor yes but i think the benefits out weight the weight drawbavk. It allows us to use a piston on a wheelie bar as well.
It depends on your deployment method too.
With motors, the claw arms can go all the way at the back and unfold later in the match to fit in the required space.
Pneumatics are faster, but deployment can be complicated.
Personally I use motors for my team’s claw hybrid.
I honestly don’t think that it matters. I think the driving is more important to be honest. Also, we have never ran out of air. If you do run out of air you should probably check to see if you have a leak.
We used a pneumatic claw at our latest competition, and are switching. Not because of air, but for the following reasons:
- Our claw was single piston so we could get a lot of grabs. This was nice, however we couldn’t get enough grip on cubes to lift them.
- Not having the sides linked left some issues. This might be because we had a single piston claw, but our claw would get shifted to one side when we drove instead of holding tight like a motor claw. This left us dropping stars when we turned towards the wall.
- We used pneumatic for speed, but when we later took slow motion videos of our pneumatic claw vs. a motorized claw (from the same opening position), a motorized claw only took about a max of .1 seconds longer to fully open.
Although the single piston might be a major factor on why our claw behaved the way it did, I would think you wouldn’t have enough air for competitive matches with dual piston claws.
Our sister team (3946C, @Sam Zmily @Sebastian Melendez) ran into serious issues regarding PTC tripping with a motor claw. To prevent burning out, they used some poorly tuned PID and couldn’t get it to work well. Probably just them being bad though, since there are plenty of other motor claws that are working well.
Ok so what type of gears are people putting on there claw. If I do a motorized claw I would want the gears connected. What type of gears are people using and in what ways are you using them?
I’m curious as to where this goes, because my team is wanting to switch to a claw-dumper but as of right now we’re in the awkward midphase of being a pure-claw, and from what I’ve seen in videos and in person (@ChaseJahay 's bot), Pneumatic claws tend to be strong and quick, while motorized ones can be slower but have the potential to be much stronger. From what I’ve gathered this tends to be more of a preference type of thing, but I could be wrong.
The main problem with a pneumatic claw would probably be that it can only be all the way open or all the way closed - it won’t have a wide range of motion for certain situations (or is this wrong?)
No that is correct which is why i am going to change. When a star is pushed in the corner. It is super hard to get it with a pneumatic claw. But with a motorized claw you can make your claw smaller and fit into the smaller places.
I like how motors can score a whole fence at a time while pneumatics need more time.
My team has used both, and from our experience pneumatics are the best, because they dont overheat and we can deploy them in 200 ms so its a big advantage, the only thing that can be tricky is running out of sufficient air if you dont know how to properly control it.