In Micromouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromouse) - a competition where autonomous devices solve a mouse maze - the fastest competitors are all using fans to increase traction (and thus speed).
radicalbyte, you're absolutely right that the use of fans in Micromouse increases the traction, and therefore the speed at which the maze is solved. Suction allows for impressive performances.
However, a small caveat that might be worth considering is that while the suction indeed increases speed, it might be more accurate to say that it primarily improves acceleration instead of car speed: The issue often lies with achieving rapid acceleration rather than with maintaining high speed. Even systems with relatively low traction can reach high speeds given enough time and distance, but the ability to accelerate quickly is crucial in competitions like Micromouse.
These cars stem from the Formula Student, which since 2022 has re-allowed the previously forbidden "powered ground effect".
But this car has an upgraded battery and powertrain beyond what the rules allow and they maybe also use tire warmers and potentially rubber/glue on the launch surface/tires
Interesting. This is a Formula Student car, the european version of the Formula SAE. Powered ground effects were banned a long time ago in Formula SAE, but it seems like Formula Student does allow them.
Had the same thought, 0-100kmph in 3sec gives so much wheel spin.
Must be a whole lot of electronic trickery ever invented from launch control, traction control to power management plus the mechanical stuff sticky tyres, down force.
It amazes me how much faster we have got the last 6-7 years.
Racing rules are not generally updated because ground effect (powered or not) is a safety concern because losing traction through a corner suddenly when it fails can be catastrophic. This is why it was banned in F1 in the 80s, damage or getting lifted up and the car will suddenly fly off the track.
One of the photos really brought something home to me. Where I would expect to see an axle or something to provide torque to wheels from the engine, there is just a yellow wire.
I know that's how electric cars work. But something about it in the racing car context just brings it home to me - electricity just works differently to all our other intuitions about the world. Factories used to have bands and axels taking power from one central steam engine to all corners of the building. And then they got redesigned once electricity came in.
I got a gut realisation from that photo that something similar is / has happened.
I like to emphasise using "boring tech" at work to avoid chasing too many rainbows. But sometimes there is a pot of gold and I need to remember that, else my factory will remain steam powered.
The "instant" torque provided by electric motors compared to traditional IC/drivetrain systems is really sexy, but what is perhaps more useful is the vastly quicker power modulation that is possible with electric systems.
Electric cars can manage traction control so much more precisely that they can do seemingly impossible things. This snow climb comparison between various Audis - IC and electric, demonstrated that electric traction control could easily manage low friction scenarios which seem unimaginable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJRRvHlvhAI
> Factories used to have bands and axels taking power from one central steam engine to all corners of the building.
From my own experience: a popular home woodworker tool from the middle of the 20th century is a Shop Smith. It had a motor that you would couple to the various mounted attachments to run the lathe or the band saw or the table saw etc one tool at a time. I guess part of the appeal was certainly the size savings, but I have to think it was also only having to buy one electric motor. Life changingly good motors are now commodity parts, and artisanally crafted ones are setting acceleration world records. Cool time to be alive.
Tractors, still widely used today, as essentially a mobile version of this.
One of the main purposes of a tractor, compared to other farm vehicles, is that it has a power take-off [0] to enable the engine to drive other farm implements like combines.
Kind of. This team is specifically using hub motors, thus bypassing the need for traditional axles. Hub motors are notoriously inefficient, though, so you don’t see them in normal BEVs which typically mount the motors near the center of the axle (as part of an “e-axle”). Basically, this team’s car is purpose built only for acceleration and thus gets away with doing things you wouldn’t see in cars that need to maintain speed or drive efficiently. Great ingenuity by them!
The use of hub motors is probably best when acceleration is paramount, but when handling starts to come into play (e.g., on road courses), it is likely best to bring the motors inboard and spend the extra weight and complexity of axles, as the unsprung weight outboard of the suspension is a serious detriment to handling.
> Factories used to have bands and axels taking power from one central steam engine to all corners of the building. And then they got redesigned once electricity came in.
Fascinating fact you might enjoy: many modern industrial facilities use compressed air to power many of the devices inside.
At a lot of Amazon facilities, a main compressor is somewhere on site keeping a large tank full. The compressed air is piped throughout the facility[0], and used to power a lot of moving parts in an open loop, making a distinctive 'hiss' sound[1] as the device moves and releases air. Not everything, certainly, but a lot of simple devices that need to move quickly and with some force.
It's all computer controlled and yes, electricity is a major part- but the driving force is coming from compressed air. And that's pretty neat.
[0] (Or so it was explained to me by the controls tech guys there)
I thought maybe this was a superficial tear-down but nope, it's a whole heckin teardown and measurement of components and relubing and cleaning and etc.
I wonder if they'd go any faster if the rules allowed overhead cams!
Even though these cars have disastrous efficiency and need to be completely rebuilt after every run and have backwards rules that leave them using "ancient" technology, I can't help but be awed by the effectiveness of the sledgehammer approach.
Thinking out loud, but it's mostly power to weight ratio isn't it?
With batteries currently being less energy dense than fuel, can an electric car be faster?
Now there's more to the vehicles than just the energy supply, so I suppose if an electric car could harness battery power more efficiently (i.e. with less weight) than an ICE powered vehicle, it could be faster?
I was sure you made a typo and meant 10000 feet, instead of 1000. But after checking, yeah, it makes sense to make the track shorter to avoid the cars reaching even more insane speeds.
they've been playing this trick with top-fuel dragsters for decades - the "speed" was measured far before the end of the course. I think it was to keep the speeds below 300mph to help with track insurance.
I think hub motors like this are the future. Frees up space under the car for more battery. Removes the complexity of drive shafts and universal joints. Gives software full traction control. Reduces design time for new vehicles (just route a power and data cable to a wheel and you have a vehicle). Is the first step to all-electric braking.
The downside is more unsprung mass. But modern motors are getting lighter and lighter. And without a drive shaft, wheels could do crazy things like moving in and out to avoid potholes, or dynamically adjust camber to match the road you're on.
Modern motors get lighter in part because they can offer lower torque with a smaller rotor but compensate with higher rpm. That’s not possible for a hub motor
The hub motors on the car in the OP run at ~24k RPM (faster than any production electric car AFAIK) and have a multistage planetary gearbox for reduction.
Pretty much all top Formula Student cars now use hub motors. Mainly for packaging reasons. Putting the motor in the unused space in the wheel means you can make a smaller chassis and have more space for wings and underbody aero.
I was wondering how this compared to motorcycles, and didn't realize that today's production motorcycles are not significantly faster than modern hypercars, the fastest motocycle clocking in at 2.2 seconds [1]
Ignoring the million dollar sports cars, other cars such as Porsche 911 turbo s from 2020 is 2.1s.[2].
I know, Tesla and Lucid, etc are also crazy fast, but I believe their quoted 0-60 times are all with a roll-out.
Cars designed for high speed will have a significant advantage over a motorcycle through capturing down forces to dramatically increase the amount of friction between the tires and the surface before losing grip and spinning out. Motorcycles can own the power to weight ratio category, but they can't use all that power because at that point the wheels just spin.
I found it super interesting when I learned that one of the biggest advances in maze solving races is that someone ended up putting a fan in their little "mouse" to push down so the wheels could get more traction.
Out of curiosity, what's the point of a driver in something like this besides to have a human in the vehicle adding weight? Are they doing much?
Serious & maybe very ignorant question.
- Edit - For clarification, my reason for asking was due to this occurring in less than 1 second. I don't understand what the driver does as I'm assuming they have no gears to shift or turns to make.
I assume it's because racing, as a sport, is a lot less interesting without the variable of a human with particular skills operating the vehicle. I doubt crowds would be as interested in watching cars race on autopilot, though it'd still be kind of cool, I guess.
> racing, as a sport, is a lot less interesting without the variable of a human with particular skills operating the vehicle.
If full self-driving gets much better, I think it could be fun to see this happen. It would be like a hackathon with teams swapping out and improving on strategies through laps. The qualifiers could happen on electric miniatures then the final round would get a full car to race on a track.
Guinness world records are well defined and some are kinda arbitrary. In some sense, I'm sure the driver is there to satisfy the rules of the world record. In another sense, I'm sure they're there to have a load of fun, too.
> "To ensure strong traction right from the start, the AMZ team has developed a kind of vacuum cleaner that holds the vehicle down to the ground by suction."
Traction is now the limiting factor, so better acceleration results will be driven (hah) by better traction.
Traction has always been the limiting factor in automotive performance.
There is a reason why a Civic Type R set a faster time than exotic cars of early 2010s, and thats because modern street tire compounds are as grippy as slick racing tires from those years. And now, race tires have a static friction coefficient greater than 1, because when warmed up they actually glue themselves to the road.
These cars would appear to be utterly dependent on maintaining a very specific distance from the track for the ability to stay grounded. You imagine going into a curve at high speed and the slightest body roll or debris on the track that might kick the car up an inch or so would break the suction and send the car flipping like a pancake.
Readit News
https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a32350/jim-hall-cha...
Still neat stuff.
Race sanctioning bodies will need to update their rules or these will just be one off bragging rights.
However, a small caveat that might be worth considering is that while the suction indeed increases speed, it might be more accurate to say that it primarily improves acceleration instead of car speed: The issue often lies with achieving rapid acceleration rather than with maintaining high speed. Even systems with relatively low traction can reach high speeds given enough time and distance, but the ability to accelerate quickly is crucial in competitions like Micromouse.
https://youtu.be/B294RfWj1QE?si=jxYpIgwtH44at6Bq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JYp9eGC3Cc
But this car has an upgraded battery and powertrain beyond what the rules allow and they maybe also use tire warmers and potentially rubber/glue on the launch surface/tires
I have no idea what you're on about with "rubber/glue on the launch surface/tires." That's not a Thing.
It amazes me how much faster we have got the last 6-7 years.
Another modern electric fan car which holds the goodwood record: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TptzkkbC1vE
I know that's how electric cars work. But something about it in the racing car context just brings it home to me - electricity just works differently to all our other intuitions about the world. Factories used to have bands and axels taking power from one central steam engine to all corners of the building. And then they got redesigned once electricity came in.
I got a gut realisation from that photo that something similar is / has happened.
I like to emphasise using "boring tech" at work to avoid chasing too many rainbows. But sometimes there is a pot of gold and I need to remember that, else my factory will remain steam powered.
Electric cars can manage traction control so much more precisely that they can do seemingly impossible things. This snow climb comparison between various Audis - IC and electric, demonstrated that electric traction control could easily manage low friction scenarios which seem unimaginable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJRRvHlvhAI
Climbing an iced over driveway on a hill in Utah on vacation while $90k big ass trucks were abandoned at the foot of the hill was awesome.
I’ve had some very high end 4x4’s in my time and none of them could climb, stop or accelerate like this $50k hot hatch.
The instant response to all 4 wheels being updated at kilohertz is a whole other paradigm.
From my own experience: a popular home woodworker tool from the middle of the 20th century is a Shop Smith. It had a motor that you would couple to the various mounted attachments to run the lathe or the band saw or the table saw etc one tool at a time. I guess part of the appeal was certainly the size savings, but I have to think it was also only having to buy one electric motor. Life changingly good motors are now commodity parts, and artisanally crafted ones are setting acceleration world records. Cool time to be alive.
One of the main purposes of a tractor, compared to other farm vehicles, is that it has a power take-off [0] to enable the engine to drive other farm implements like combines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_take-off
[1] https://evcentral.com.au/why-dont-evs-have-four-in-wheel-mot...
The use of hub motors is probably best when acceleration is paramount, but when handling starts to come into play (e.g., on road courses), it is likely best to bring the motors inboard and spend the extra weight and complexity of axles, as the unsprung weight outboard of the suspension is a serious detriment to handling.
Fascinating fact you might enjoy: many modern industrial facilities use compressed air to power many of the devices inside.
At a lot of Amazon facilities, a main compressor is somewhere on site keeping a large tank full. The compressed air is piped throughout the facility[0], and used to power a lot of moving parts in an open loop, making a distinctive 'hiss' sound[1] as the device moves and releases air. Not everything, certainly, but a lot of simple devices that need to move quickly and with some force.
It's all computer controlled and yes, electricity is a major part- but the driving force is coming from compressed air. And that's pretty neat.
[0] (Or so it was explained to me by the controls tech guys there)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Hf08XrI_A (the first 30 seconds or so it's really noticeable).
It's amazing that all those car cylinders going up and down (or technically, being forced up and down by tiny explosions) are transformed into work.
Rotary motion -> work has been part of humanity for a long time. I suppose in our space-bound future it won't be a big factor
Here's Brittany Force who holds the current records (fastest time, fastest speed):
https://www.nhra.com/news/2022/brittany-force-sets-national-...
0 to 338.43 mph in 3.665 seconds over 1000 feet. (The cars got too fast for 1,320 feet and have been racing 1000 feet since 2008.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1RYmUxUqso
Also the end of this video gives an awesome perspective that really shows the insane speed of these cars.
11,000hp!
Top Fuel: 0-60mph in ~0.4s
Wow.
That's students though, students at ~0.9s! Wow.
Even though these cars have disastrous efficiency and need to be completely rebuilt after every run and have backwards rules that leave them using "ancient" technology, I can't help but be awed by the effectiveness of the sledgehammer approach.
With batteries currently being less energy dense than fuel, can an electric car be faster?
Now there's more to the vehicles than just the energy supply, so I suppose if an electric car could harness battery power more efficiently (i.e. with less weight) than an ICE powered vehicle, it could be faster?
The downside is more unsprung mass. But modern motors are getting lighter and lighter. And without a drive shaft, wheels could do crazy things like moving in and out to avoid potholes, or dynamically adjust camber to match the road you're on.
Pretty much all top Formula Student cars now use hub motors. Mainly for packaging reasons. Putting the motor in the unused space in the wheel means you can make a smaller chassis and have more space for wings and underbody aero.
And why you cannot have small hub motor with high voltage (kilovolts) and very high rpm?
Ignoring the million dollar sports cars, other cars such as Porsche 911 turbo s from 2020 is 2.1s.[2].
I know, Tesla and Lucid, etc are also crazy fast, but I believe their quoted 0-60 times are all with a roll-out.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_mot...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_car...
I found it super interesting when I learned that one of the biggest advances in maze solving races is that someone ended up putting a fan in their little "mouse" to push down so the wheels could get more traction.
https://hackaday.com/2008/11/26/vacuum-micromouse/
More details on maze racing from Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw
https://youtu.be/_3868Dnogrk?si=o4rkjjOcdHIBSbMt
Serious & maybe very ignorant question.
- Edit - For clarification, my reason for asking was due to this occurring in less than 1 second. I don't understand what the driver does as I'm assuming they have no gears to shift or turns to make.
I’m no mechanical engineer, but I could definitely make something without a human inside of it go from 0-100 in less than a second.
Otherwise it’s just a missle with a required degree of ground contact, no?
If full self-driving gets much better, I think it could be fun to see this happen. It would be like a hackathon with teams swapping out and improving on strategies through laps. The qualifiers could happen on electric miniatures then the final round would get a full car to race on a track.
I assume it's just a requirement for this Guiness record category, or they didn't want to bother with all the software.
Traction is now the limiting factor, so better acceleration results will be driven (hah) by better traction.
There is a reason why a Civic Type R set a faster time than exotic cars of early 2010s, and thats because modern street tire compounds are as grippy as slick racing tires from those years. And now, race tires have a static friction coefficient greater than 1, because when warmed up they actually glue themselves to the road.
It was swiftly banned of course, since it worked too well.
These cars would appear to be utterly dependent on maintaining a very specific distance from the track for the ability to stay grounded. You imagine going into a curve at high speed and the slightest body roll or debris on the track that might kick the car up an inch or so would break the suction and send the car flipping like a pancake.