[FTC]: Power Surge Robot

[Nitro-Guy]

Hi all,

Now that the season's over, I put together a little video of our robot's capabilities. You can watch it here (http://thenxtstep.blogspot.com/2009/05/power-surge-robot.html). In it, you can see that we actually had two different kinds of 2-puck-rack autonomous modes (although we only ended up using one kind). You can also see our Intake System in more detail.

By the way, we competed at the Monty Madness FTC event on Saturday; really great event! We went undefeated, and broke our high score again: 290 points against two functioning opponents! We got 18 pucks in the triangle in autonomous mode, and then got all 16 of our remaining pucks in the triangle in tele-op mode and got up on our opponent's ramp to get the bonus. Our alliance partner stayed on the ramp the entire match, thereby gaining us another 10 bonus points.

-Jonathan

[Scoutin' Master]

Great video; awesome robot!! Congrats to Power Surge on your win in Monty, I got to see the finals and it was total domination! :D Brought back fond memories of how much fun I had at Monty when I was in FTC. :)

[ttldomination]

Amazing Robot, and like amazing robots, there are some parts that are always intriguing.

More specifically my questions are concerning:

Your intake system. Would you mind either describing the system and/or posting some pictures of the system?

Also, I notice that when your system goes up against, a puck rack, you have a tab mounted on a servo which detects the rack. My question is how exactly do you "sense" the rack? Is it programmed so that if the servo senses motion via a position change, then it assumes it is in it's "unload rack" position?

[Lowfategg]

Best FTC robot this year, this thing is the meaning of shock and awe.

It weighted like 26 lbs right? Ours only weighted up to 17.9 in vex steel parts, so that is insane.

[fredliu168]

All I can say is... WOW

[Nitro-Guy]

ttldomination,

The Intake System was kind of interesting, because we only had three LEGO motors available when we built it and a small cross-sectional space in the front of the robot to install it. So we came up with a simple mechanical design that takes up about 2 inches of the width of the robot and that makes one LEGO motor do three different tasks. The rotating turbine is powered by one LEGO motor. This turbine, rotating in one direction, first sweeps pucks underneath the robot. When the pucks bang into a wall underneath the robot, the turbine then kicks the front of the puck up, thereby rotating the puck into a vertical position. As the puck gets kicked up, it bangs into a second wall. This causes the turbine to then lift the puck off the ground up into a vertical conveyor belt system that uses non-slip pad for conveyor belts. This conveyor belt system lifts the puck over 17 inches off the ground and then drops it into our Magazine for delivery.

In terms of the rack-detecting tab, we have a touch sensor-bumper mounted on the servo.

Tyler,

Yeah it was 26 lbs at the regional tournaments; by Atlanta it was up to 29 lbs. :)

-Jonathan

[ttldomination]

Wow...that is very efficient use of the system. I'm guessing that it was a a great benefit to have past LEGO league members who are proficient with the kit.

[Nitro-Guy]

Thanks... I think FLL was helpful for those of us who were new to FTC as competition experience, but I don't know if having FLL members was very helpful for our experience with the kit, because I was already very familiar with the NXT system. I'd been building robots with it as a hobby ever since it came out, and had co-authored some robotics bestselling books on it.

-Jonathan