My team has continuously had problems with building a drivetrain that’s fast enough to grab the neutral goals in auton but also has enough torque to go up the platform with 3 goals and balance. So far we can go onto the platform with 2-3 goals really well, but we just don’t have the speed in auton. Currently, we have a 4 motor, 4 Omni drive with 60 and 84 tooth high-strength gears in our gear ratio. We want to keep the amount of torque on our drivetrain but we need more speed. What is the best way to do this?
Put more motors on the drivetrain.
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Literally the only way for more power^
Besides that you can try to increase efficiency of your drivetrain by removing as much friction as possible
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Not an expert on gearing motors, but maybe try using three gears per wheel setup? Your current gear ratio is 5:7 (if i did that right), so try setting up an equivalently stacked two-gear setup, with a smaller gear in between them? So it would be like motor->Big gear->Small gear->Medium gear
Torque and velocity have a directly inverse relationship, the only way to get more of both is to add motors. Increasing velocity with the same power will decrease torque, and vice versa. No two ways about it unfortunately.
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That’s my bad, but also good to know
with the thing you said, that would not impact anything. adding gears between motors and the wheels only impacts direction. the only ratio that matters is the one between the motors and the wheels. you can have as many gears of as many sizes as you want between the motors and wheels, and if the motor’s gear and wheel’s gear doesn’t change, your ratio never will.
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That’s good to know. With that in mind, why do some teams use more than two gears in their drive setups?
To distribute the motor power to the front and back wheel.
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oh… my team did that in the first half of this season, that was a pretty bad question on my part. Thank you for being patient.
yep, using more gears allows them to connect both wheels.
Weight is the only other factor that hasn’t been mentioned yet. A lighter robot requires less power and the difference can be converted into speed.
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You cant have a fast and high torque drivetrain, high torque is slow but strong, speed is fast but weak. Now you could put more motors in your drive which will give you more overall power which would mean higher overall combined torque and speed. Now there is a way to make a drive switch between fast and high torque but you would have to find out how to make a transmission. If you make a working transmission you should be able to switch gears from high torque to speed.