Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms

518 Chapter 26 • Racing Against Time

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Acceleration is also influenced negatively by the mass you have to move:

under the same power, the higher the mass, the lower the acceleration.

This is due to inertia (see Chapter 5), which explains why it’s harder to

get a car rolling than it is to push a child in a stroller. So a very impor-

tant thing to do is to keep the mass at a minimum. Build a lightweight

structure.

Up to this point, the challenge is essentially electro-mechanical. No need for

an RCX, a vehicle supplied by a battery box would perform the same, or even

better (recall that the RCX has an inner current-limiting device, the battery box

doesn’