VEX V5 motors are much more powerful than previous VEX motors, but even they are not infinitely powerful. They are, however, able to give programmers a lot of information on what is going on in the motor. We wanted to test the hypothesis that adding rubber bands to an arm can significantly reduce the work done by a motor, and both reduce power consumption and increase motor life. We picked this as a demonstration program to show how you can use V5 motor properties to learn important facts about the performance of your robot.
We used our V5 Clawbot to graph the power usage of the arm motor with and without rubber bands and with and without weight. Here is one of our power usage charts, which maps motor power use in watts against arm angle (where zero degrees is the arm starting position). We wrote the program in Robot Mesh Studio Python.
Click this link to read the full test report and see all the graphs.
