Monday, November 24, 2008

Get in Gear (Investigation Summary)

As we have explored, the ration between the driving wheel and driven wheel is very important to the speed of the robot. Here is what will happen if we change the gear ratio:

If the driving wheel is bigger than the driven wheel, the robot will move faster since 1 rotation of the motor corresponds to more rotations on the driven wheel.

In contrary, if the driving wheel is smaller than the driven wheel, then the robot will have a slower speed. This is because 1 rotation of the motor will cause the driven wheel to rotate less.

The principle of physics behind the cause of this phenomenon is something called torque. We increase the torque of the robot by reducing some power. As torque is directly proportional to the displacement of an object, increase in torque will result in an increase in displacement.

5 comments:

Christoffer Dahlen said...

I think that the it explains how the robot converts the power but where does it say thing about the other wheels??

Good job anyway

Anonymous said...

great job explaining the gear ratio and how to build speed or power.

Johnny said...

Good job ! You got the idea !

K.Yong said...

"driving wheel is bigger than the driven wheel" shouldn't this be the opposite meaning that the driving wheel is smaller than the driven wheel?

y.shih said...

Yeah, I realized it afterward that I have the other way around. Thanks for pointing it out, I will fix it right now.