This is a problem that has troubled us for a long time. How do we transmit the power of the motor to the tires to drive the whole thing to move?
Because our prototype is overall small and the motor is large, we cannot directly connect the motor parallel to the tire and connect them together through only one gear. Our initial idea was to create a gear train that would transfer power to the rear axle by rotating layers of gears. This leads to the following two situations. If we put the motor as close as possible to the tire, the rotation direction of the motor will be orthogonal to the direction of the tire. Then we need to design the steering gear, and we have no experience in this area. If they are parallel, the distance will be too far, and several or even dozens of gears will need to be used to connect them. This will inevitably increase the chance of errors and may cause a loss of power due to friction.
After consulting Tony, the solution we got was to use conveyor belts to connect the axles and gears of the motor respectively for long-distance power transmission. In order to make the conveyor belt fit our gears, we finally successfully made our robot trolley move after debugging the gears on the motor and tire shaft many times.
