Under the Hood: Battery

How Robotarget Trains All Day on One Charge

A full day of training on a single charge sounds like the result of a big battery. It is not. It is the result of wasting less of the battery you have. The T1 and T2 get their runtime from efficiency, and the most interesting part of that story is the gearbox.

Between the motor and the target sits a gearbox, and not all gearboxes are equal. A lot of motion systems use a worm gear, and for one reason: a worm gear is self-locking. It holds the target in position without the motor having to spend any energy to keep it there. That sounds like a free win.

The cost is friction. Worm gears are mechanically inefficient at actually transmitting power. A meaningful share of every watt the motor produces is lost as heat in the gearbox rather than turned into motion. You pay for that loss every time the target moves, all day long.

We went the other way and used back-drivable gearboxes on the T1 and T2. Back-drivable means the system does not lock itself in place, so the motor has to spend a little effort to hold a position. That makes it harder to control, the same theme as our motor choice, and we accepted it for the same reason: the efficiency is worth it.

A back-drivable gearbox transmits power with far less friction loss. More of the battery goes into moving the target and less into heating up gears. Over a full day of repetitions, that efficiency is most of where the runtime comes from.

Here is the payoff that a self-locking gearbox can never offer. Because our gearbox is back-drivable, motion can flow backward through it, from the target into the system, not just outward. That means when a target movement carries kinetic energy, the system can capture some of it and feed it back to charge the battery, instead of simply burning it off.

If that sounds familiar, it is the same idea as regenerative braking on an electric car, where slowing down recovers energy instead of throwing it away as heat. A Robotarget recycles a portion of its own movement back into runtime.

The result is a system that trains for a full day on one charge, the T2 rated at eight hours, with extended-runtime variants available when you need even more. Fewer charges, less downtime, and more reps per session. The harder engineering choice is the one that keeps you on the line longer.

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