Ideal Bot (High speed or torque)

In many a late night conversation this year I have participated in a discussion over speed or strength for starstruck. I personally prefer speed with a 4 motor turbo drive in addition to 6 motor high speed lift w/ pneumatics. How would you build out a robot for this years game ?

We’ve ran a 6 motor turbo drive on 3.25 inch wheels with no issues for most of the year. Recently we switched to a high speed 4 motor drive on 4 inch wheels with a 6 motor high speed lift. (Not a significant change but we geared down because we we’re using 4 motors and didn’t want to burnout) At the end of the day, we found that our throw cycles were f aster because of the arm speed.

I think 4 motors will burn out at 2.4:1 on 4" wheels. Even on 3.25 running such a high gear ratio is risky without 6 motors.

I am running turbo 4" 4 motor and i have been doing perfectly fine, i only see problems when i have been driving it fir an hiur or two without changing the battery.

How much does your robot weigh?

I have the same setup as @vex2.0 with a 4 motor turbo on 4" wheels and we weigh a little over 9 lbs. Didn’t have any problems throughout our entire competition last weekend except for breaking an internal motor gear.

My team went with the torque route. We have a 10 motor drive train using 4 omni wheels.

With or without batteries? No offense, but I tend to doubt it when people say their robot is under 10 pounds, especially after building a robot focused on being light and still coming in at 12 pounds. Just 12 motors, a cortex, power expander, and 2 batteries is ~5.5 pounds without any structure at all.

My question is why would you need 10 motors on your base.

@nleos i belive he was making a pushbot, even though with 4 motors high speed on 4" omnis i have no problem pushing 5 stars under but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I had a push bot at the beginning of the season with 4 motor drive that was able to push stars under.

right, 10 motors is not necessary, i use this strategy whenever theres large numbers of stars near that area, even though my bot isnt specifically built for it

I think that 10 motors is overkill

You can do it fairly easily if you do your research into efficient structures, we only use 1 lb of aluminum C-channels on our robot, our screws & nuts probably weigh more, I’ll post my CAD model and a robot reveal next week

@legomstr1
is this your robot?

i seriously doubt you used 1 lb of c channel though, to put that into prospective, thats 6 peices of 1x2x25

@9065_parker We used a little under 10 1x2x35 pieces, which at 0.157 lbs a piece is about 1 and a half lbs, which is over what I estimated, but still very light

@legomstr1 ok, now i really want to see uour robot

Mine is about the same with two battries just under 9 pounds and it’s 12 inches by 17 inches long, very small and nimble robot, fun to drive and i have only used 9 c-channls 35 long which are cut into different lenths.
Edit - its not a pushbot it’s a claw hybrid which can do 6 stars all far and hang

Edit again - 4 for chassis 3 for towers 2 for towers and the ones I forgot 3 for claw and for all the bracing stand off is used and 1 for drive bracing, lel seemed way off

I’m going to remain skeptical.

5 c-channel on the chassis - 2 on each side and one to attach the two sides
2 minimum for lift towers
2 minimum for lift arm
2 minimum for a claw

That’s already 11 c-channel. I can see 10 if you cut the c-channel in half, but I am still doubtful.

I just don’t see how such a minimalistic robot will be structurally sound or competitive.

As it’s said in my homeland 4chan, “pics or it didn’t happen”