Re: Robot climbing times
 

Why?

It can be as simple as this;

Drive robot into bar at 30". You have some sort of hard stop to facilitate this.

Actuate the cylinder, this raises the robot and if it's a double solenoid the motion can all happen after the buzzer.

The above hardstop could even be a sensor automating the process; the driver just rams the pyramid at full speed and can't miss.

Re: Robot climbing times
 

Well I'm taking this as the whole time to line-up and lift. From my years watching FRC end games, many teams will spend the extra 5 seconds to make sure they are 100% locked on. Some will miss a first try and then. I said 3 is a good average, but you will see teams spend 15+ seconds on a 10 point hang.

With your method it is easy to pull off a quick 10 point hang, but not all teams will go that route and will try something innovative.

Re: Robot climbing times
 

Let me ask this in a different way. Assuming there are roughly 2,500 teams competing this year:

What will be the average time to both line up and hang of ALL of the top 250 teams? (10%)

Of the teams that are not in the top 10%, being 2,250 teams, what would be the combine average time it takes to align and climb of all of them?

Re: Robot climbing times
 

Honestly, a 10 pt hang is just so quick and easy that I'm having difficulty finding a reason anyone not to do it, unless you had 4 discs you knew you were going to make in the last couple seconds. Every team that can hang should bring a "hanging kit" they could install to a partner's robot in about 15 minutes if a partner robot couldn't hang (provided they are under the weight limit by enough).

Re: Robot climbing times
 

I don't think anyone is claiming it to be hard to hang from level 1, it's just the time to do it will vary.

Re: Robot climbing times
 

A 10 point hang doesn't even require an active mechanism. An inverted wedge, a moderately fast drivetrain, and the right center of mass will do the trick.

Re: Robot climbing times
 

For teams that can 10 point hang, the average should only be 3-5 seconds. But I don't think it will be, because asking teams to build a mechanism robust enough to lift a 120 lb robot is still a challenge (not to pick on the design mentioned here too much, but a 1 foot cylinder with a hook being rammed into a pole is a decent lever arm that teams may not have braced all that well). I think a lot of mechanisms will jam, miss, be damaged beyond repair, etc. and that's ignoring lining up correctly (what if the hook spins and faces the wrong way?). I see the average being more like 20, with at least a third of attempts failing.

I'm taking a pessimistic view here, and I wish 95% of teams could at least 10 point hang because all alliances scoring 30+ a match would make for a really exciting competition. I've seen too many 0-0 or 0-2 matches to think it will happen though.

Re: Robot climbing times
 

The first thing that will prevent 10-point hangs is, in my guess, robots that are sufficiently tall that very small deviations in their center-of-gravity will torque the robot just enough so that it touches the ground while hanging from the lowest bar.

If the hooking device is directly above the robot's center of gravity, a hook with either a sufficiently fat pneumatic cylinder or a ratcheting winch should be sufficient for a ten-pointer, and very fast.