Some Technical Takeaways from Our First Worlds

We did pretty well at Starstruck Worlds for our first time but did not make it into the playoffs because of a weak chassis and the immense strategy other teams used to secure their own spots. However, we learned a bunch about VEX.

This past season, we designed our robot from competition to competition, rather than looking at the bigger picture -. Worlds. For In The Zone, we need to design a Worlds' robot and play every tournament as if it was Worlds. We need to bring our A-game. In Worlds, the teams that went far had consistent bots that never broke down, required little maintenance, and had good autonomous codes. This is what we need to design for.

At Starstruck Worlds, we had a great lift but did not have a very good chassis. The increase of elements coming over the fence, the fast-paced action of the game and the anti-static spray on the mats caused our chassis to slow down and have to work harder. Btw, we used a drop-center chassis with a middle wheel drive.

The teams that were good all used the same 4-wheel chain drive. This drive was far superior to any chassis because of its speed and the ability to maintain power over a long period. We saw many teams attempt to build this chassis with the 4" Omni wheels in order to maximize their speed. Even though this seemed like a good idea, it would slow down just like the drop-center drive. With bigger wheels, you should theoretically gain speed because the robot will go farther per one rotation of axle. However, this causes too much stress on the motors causing burnouts.

To solve this, some teams like 6007 used 3.25" Omni wheels to be able to maintain their speed and have it as fast as the 4" drive. We like to think about this like a gear ratio. In a speed gear ratio, sure, you're increasing your speed, but you are losing torque. Note that on the arms of many Starstruck robots was the notorious 5:1 torque gear ratio. This gear ratio allowed stars to be scored as quickly as possible. The reason that teams did not use speed gear ratios on their arms is that the stars carried too much weight, causing the motors to have to work much harder to lift them up.

This applies to the chassis because of the load the chassis has to drive under. It's kind of like finding the sweet spot for your motors. We will probably be using this chasiss for ITZ because of its speed and efficiency.