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Aarhus-University-MPE / ArcticRover

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Traction and wheel size #4

Open grinsted opened 2 years ago

grinsted commented 2 years ago

ArcticRover firmware version

No response

Area(s) with issue?

Hardware Issue

Steps to reproduce

The current alu wheels are 20cm wide and have Ø32 (excluding the L-profiles). These wheels have too little traction in soft snow.

My gut feeling is that the contact area should be a factor 4 greater.

Idea: Compare the weight to contact area to many existing snow vehicles to get an indication if dimensioning is off.

✔️ Expected Behavior

Good traction under a wide range of snow conditions.

❌ Actual Behavior

The wheels dig into the snow as soon as the surface is not hard and compacted.

grinsted commented 2 years ago

Tried wrapping the wheels in a snowmobile belt. This increased the width to 50cm, and the diameter by a small amount. This seems to have much better traction in soft snow, but we then experienced stalling errors from the motors.