Gears are very important elements in a robot. They don't work by itself; in fact we need at least 2 of them. What they basically do is to transform one force into another effectively like a pulley or a chain. Beyond that, however the chapter discusses some properties of gears, relating to important aspects of physics. First of all, every gear has a certain number of teeth. This number of teeth simply tells us a lot of things. It determines the size of a gear. The more teeth a gear has, the bigger it is. Furthermore, when two or more gears are combined together, the number of teeth on each gear affects the speed of a robot. For instance, suppose a robot has two gears on its motor. One is a driving gear, which has 12 teeth and the other, a driven gear, which has 36 teeth. The time for the driving gear to rotate once is equal to the one for the driven gear to rotate 3 times. Therefore, the robot can speed up 3 times than an ordinary robot with the same number of teeth of a driving gear and a driven gear. This acceleration is called angular velcocity. However, we can't simply speed up the robot without losing anything. In fact, angular velocity decreases torque. The torque is strength of gears, which is used in such a way to go up tilt. The larger gears are, the more torque they have, because larger gears have a further distance from the centre. In order to make an extremely big torque, sacrificing the angular velocity, we can use geartrains. Here, we use more than 2 gears connected. However, it's important to set up carefully, because if torque is too big, than LEGO parts may get damaged.
There are other types of gear too. First, we have a work gear block. It looks like a stick and can connect it to types of gears mentioned eariler. It can't be turned by other gears thus create friction a lot. This friction isn't always bad as it allows very compact assembly solutions. The other gear is clutch gear. It helps to limit the strength we can get from a geared system and preserve our motors and parts. It usually accompanys geartrain.
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Very thorough explanation of the chapter, which would you say would be more useful in a ramming competition with NXT bots, angular velocity, or torque?
ReplyDeleteYour summary has all the details that we have to know in order to understand the chapter fully.
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