BestPractices

Building a drivebase in theory is very different from making a drivebase in practice. Here are some more practical considerations of building a drivebase:

1. Spacing: Spacing is making sure your wheels are spaced out from the sides of your drivebase properly. Bad spacing where your wheels can shake will cause your robot to lose energy because it will add another degree of freedom spreading out the energy. On the other hand, too much spacing will bend the beams holding the wheels and potentially damaging the beams

2. Bracing: Bad bracing could make your robot shake, losing more energy to unessary degrees of freedom. One common way to solve this is to put a beam in the middle and connect it to both sides of your robot. Make sure to put this sideways because beams can handle force better on the side.

3. Mouting: Mount pieces in a way that helps you. What many people do is add parts to the robot, and then mount onto that part. Instead of doing that designers should skip the middle man and instead mount straight onto the drivetrain.

4. Gear Slop: Space inbetween the teeth of gears causes the wheels to move without letting the motor know that it is moving. This could ruin your autonomus’code or cause energy waste. Some common solutions are to use bigger gears so that there are fewer gears between the driven one and the wheels and move the motors closer to the center so that there are fewer gears between the driven and driving.

5. Inertia: More weight at the end of the axel means that the robot will have more inertia and so stop more slowly. This will make your drivebase move more smoothly, but the tradeoff is that the extra weight will make your robot’s drive’s slower.