When a micromouse corners faster, sooner or later, it will run out of grip. That doesn’t mean it can not perform a useful turn but it will drift instead of neatly following a tangential path around the turn. To find out where the limits might be for Decimus 2B, it was set to do a constant radius turn at increasing speed.

The video shows that, for turning accelerations up to about 7500 mm/s/s, D2B can track the turn fairly well. Beyond that, there will be some drift. At higher accelerations, it can do some nice drifting turns – still with a fair degree of control thanks to the gyro.

Here the mouse wanders down and to the right because my test maze is not perfectly horizontal.

Other tests at different turn radii give much the same result. The limit of grip is at about 0.8g for D2B.

This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. Galen

    Hi,

    Was this all done using the same angular acceleration?

  2. Peter Harrison

    Yes, quite a low value was used to keep the increases smooth.

  3. Vlada Soucek

    I would bet anything, that this is not a problem with grip (tire/surface), but
    with weight distributed to the back or front of D2B (comparing acceleration values to the article ‘rocking out of control’). Performing this test with 4wheeler would be another story.

  4. Peter Harrison

    You could well be right. D2B is quite well balanced but I didn’t think to verify that before doing the run. As soon as I have a four wheel chassis, I shall have to repeat the experiment.

  5. Richard Cornish

    This looks really interesting! I would like to see a four wheel chassis demonstrating understeer and oversteer. It should be possible to program it into the chassis, or simply adjust the weight distribution?

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