Showing Mr. Bankers components of our robot

Our robot has eight motors running at once and because of this, we ran into power issues where the robot can disconnect or read encoders wrong when too much power is drawn. We met with Chris Bankers, an electrical engineer, to get ideas to reduce battery consumption. We looked at the subsystems that draw the most current under operation. He told us that when the robot draws too much power, the battery can’t sustain the voltage, causing it to drop, which can cause encoder misreads. He told us that motors draw a lot of power when initially turning or stuck in position. This causes enough power to be sucked from other components, causing a misread of the motor encoders. From what Chris told us, this led us to suspect our lift system being one of the main power consumers on the robot. So we will focus on the lift to try to mitigate the problem. Overall, it was nice talking to Mr. Bankers and we learned a lot of new ideas and reasons behind the power draw of our robot. We will use the new information we learned to solve the power draw issues on our robot.