Pushing pool noodles

[pabeekm]

What have you guys found to be successful for herding noodles?

[Peyton Yeung]

Leaving a tote on the ground is pretty good if you push it around.

[thehotsauceman]

Zip ties trimmed down and positioned to where they make kind of like a brush work well.

[BBray_T1296]

We found that the larger computer fans do a decent job of blowing the noodles out of our path, though I'm not sure they made it to the competition bot.

[GeeTwo]

The chassis. We built the KOP chassis as a 4-wheel omni, and it pushes noodles around pretty decently. Any "flat" wheel arrangement should be able to do this if you have a surface that drops to within an inch of the floor.

If your chassis has drop-center wheels or must be higher for other considerations, a piece of a push broom should work nicely. Actually, what would probably work best (haven't actually tried) would be one of those applicators that you can find in the roofing and paving section of the home improvement store. They're about 24-30" wide but only one bundle of bristles deep. It works pretty well at sweeping leaves and pine straw off the roof, which sounds like a tougher job than sweeping pool noodles across carpet.

[daliberator]

We cut up some 1/8 inch hard plastic strips about 1-1/2" in width and mounted them to the front and the back of our frame and they have worked pretty well from what my driver has told me. Thanks to 2052 for the stock! If you want to stop by our pits in Carver, we'd be happy to show them to you.

[The other Gabe]

2605 has a cool bendy PVC pushy thing that passively articulates to go over the scoring platform... easier to watch than it is to explain: (close one on red)