FIRST Team 846 Presents: Tail Of The Monkey!
 

This post is very belated . . . at least the passage of time has made me no less fond of our 2012 robot.

Tail Of The Monkey
Season Recap Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Ds_PCCGuo



Technical Specs:

- Six wheel drivetrain, 8" diameter Plactions.
- Razor wheel idlers for crossing the bump.
- Drop down ball collector controls balls across the entire front of the robot.
- Conveyor accepts balls from the floor and inbounder station.
- Pneumatic actuators tension belts to control ball feeding into the shooter.
- Shooter runs at over 5,000 RPM.
- Custom Grooved Roller powered by one Banebots motor.
- Two position hood to control trajectory.
- Key detector camera for accurate positioning on the field.
- Vision processing offloaded to Beagleboard.
- Vision camera only reads IR light via filters; impervious to interference.
- Drop down wedge (Tail of the Monkey).
- Uses CAN bus in Jaguar Speed Controllers.

Awards:
New York City Regional - Engineering Excellence, 8th alliance quarterfinalists
Silicon Valley Regional - Innovation in Control, 6th alliance quarterfinalists

Thanks to our alliance partners for the elimination rounds: 694/3059 at NYC and 852/840 at SVR! You guys are great teams.

We'll see you all at CalGames! Any comments/questions?

Re: FIRST Team 846 Presents: Tail Of The Monkey!
 

Nice robot, amazing team. It was a pleasure talking with your programming team at SVR.

Re: FIRST Team 846 Presents: Tail Of The Monkey!
 

Great robot this year. It was a real shame that you guys were plagued by those communication issues at NYC, you had a trully awesome robot and you guys are always a factor no matter the regional. It was great working with you guys and I hope that we cross paths again in the future.

Re: FIRST Team 846 Presents: Tail Of The Monkey!
 

Thats a very nice looking robot. Good luck at offseason events. I only have one question to ask you about your robot. I saw a lot of team with bridge actuators that were triangles like yours. I was just wondering how well did it work?

Re: FIRST Team 846 Presents: Tail Of The Monkey!
 

Thanks everyone for the kind comments. We were disappointed to suffer communication issues during New York City, but it seems like those are of the past.

Mr. Blay, while we never hit the same place twice for our away regional, we'll both try to qualify for Championships? ;)

Adam, the bridge wedge worked superbly. Being able to run into the bridge and onto it very smoothly (often with balls underneath the bridge) was lots of fun at competition.

PS: The more interesting part of our wedge is the slight curve we added. The wedge has a shallower angle where we first contact the bridge, because we need more force to overcome the bridge's inertia. Once the bridge gets moving, we don't need to apply as much force to keep the bridge in motion. So, we increase the slope of the curve. We also made the leading edge out of steel for a good combination of durability and slipperiness (superior to aluminum).

Re: FIRST Team 846 Presents: Tail Of The Monkey!
 

Here is a document that expands upon what Miles was saying above about the curve on the wedge as well as the material choice.

http://cl.ly/133C3z1O2T3y120Z3a1c