Round Robot(s)
 

Who all out there besides 3574 is doing a round robot and round bumpers?

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

I'd love to see a photo of that.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Seconded.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Thirded. How are you supposed to make a truly round robot? The world's largest lathe?

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Ooh, ooh, I know this! The robot isn't actually circular, it's more kind of an oval with cutouts. No, I don't have pictures, I haven't been to the build space in a while. Stupid homework.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Fourth..ed? Yeah some pictures please! although hopefully you took some before the 'bot was bagged...

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Here is a picture that was taken yesterday morning. The freesbee colector had not been instaled yet, but we'll have a better picture before midnight ;)
27.5 inches heigh
35.5 inches Diameter
As of yesterday she weight 85 pounds and we expect her not to weight more than 100 pounds by the time she's ready for competition.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Not quite round, but octagonal!

(we do have a shooter, just wasn't ready in time for Suffield Shakedown.)

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Bending.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Dont take this the wrong way, but that thing looks so cute. lol

Its so tiny and its hanging.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

It does look cute, but don't let the angle fool you! It's about 30" wide and 36" long! Our shooter looks kind of like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. With that on top it looks like a bit more than the little drive train that could (hang)!

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

That is awesome, good job.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Which Regional(s) are you attending? I enjoyed competing with you guys in Seattle last year. It was amazing to see a rookie team so inspired and prepared to compete with everyone else. Team Mean Machine is attending Portland and Spokane since Seattle and Ellensburg filled before we could get a spot. Good Luck!

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Our team had a round robot two years ago for Logomotion. It was convex for approximately 270 degrees, and had a slightly concave section for the remaining 90 degrees. It was completely wrapped in conformal bumpers. This year we have round corners. This totally befuddled the inspector at the LA scrimmage. I would attach photos, but I'm on my iPad now, and can't easily do that.

We were somewhat thwarted by the mid-build clarification that imposed a new over-restrictive bumper rule for round robots or robots with round corners. Two years ago, we were thwarted by an inter-competition rule change that did the same for our previous round robot's concave bumper section. Now, we're very focused on overcoming the consequence of the new restriction, with something (anything) before our first competition.

Edit: just saw the picture from 3574. That looks really neat! What is your base material? It looks like a solid carbon laminate.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

I'm curious about your round bumpers. On our prior round robot, we laminated 5 layers of a 5/32" mahogany plywood, dry, to make our ~14-1/2" radius bumpers.

This year, we needed a tighter 8" inside radius. We also wanted a very light bumper to aid in climbing. To get this, we made a birch-balsa-birch sandwich, similar to what was used in the brittish DeHaviland Mosquito bomber of World War II. We had to soak the birch for over two days to get it pliable enough, and then had to let everything dry on forms before laminating. This was a LOT of work, and took the efforts of ten students from start to finish. We learned a lot of ways to miscommunicate ideas and instructions.

Your curved wood is very uniform and clean. What did you use to get this great result?

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What the students did was hook a industrial vacuum bag to a compressor and bent the layers with that. They pretty much glued them together, stuck them in vacuumed the air out and let it sit for a day.

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Team 2620 isn't round nor a rectangle ;) *hint* corner climb *hint*

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Are you a pentagon?

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

No sir, we have 8 'sides'

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Another picture with finished bumpers in competition, looks like those might even be reversible with that seem down the middle.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daniele...n/photostream/

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Out of curiosity, is there really that much usable space created by using a round robot as opposed to the standard polygon shape?

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Let's assume a circular robot and a rectangular robot with the maximum allowed frame perimiter (112 inches).
For the circular robot C = 2πr. Since C = 112, the radius of the circle is 56/π or approximately 17.825 inches, and it's area is πr^2, which is 3161/π or approximately 998.220 square inches.
For a rectangular robot, we have 112 = 2l + 2w, and A = lw, or A = l(56 - l). With some calculus, we can find that the maximum area occurs when the robot is a 28x28 square, with an internal area of 784 square inches. In other words, a circular robot can have up to about 28.339% more usable area inside it's frame perimeter than a rectangular one.
You could run the numbers for any other polygon, if you really wanted to, but I'll leave that up to you (I'm too lazy). You'll find that as you increase the number of sides on your polygon, the maximum area will approach, but never reach, that of a circle with the same perimeter.

As for how useful this extra internal area is, that can only really be answered on a case-by-case basis by each time based on how much space their subsystems use.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

That's more of what I meant, I understand the calculus behind it but I was curious if the teams using it actually found that they have more space to place things or if it seemed about the same as a polygonal frame.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

From a strategic perspective, a circular robot would be harder to block, because any typical rectangular robot would just kind of "slide" to one side in a collision (though on the flipside, this would also make them less effective as defense robots).

From what I can see in the pictures of 2836 and 4743, there seems to be a lot of unused space inside their perimeter, but their robots don't seem to do a whole lot. I don't see any shooter on 2836's bot, and 4743's just looks like a simple 1-point dumper. I think they'd be able to use more of that space if their robots had more functionality, i.e a floor pickup or a 30-point climb.

Sorry if this post sounds harsh towards these two teams. I don't intend to put your robots down, just making some observations about how you've used your internal space.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

1829 has a round robot this year. As to how we made the bumpers, a ShopBot(CNC router). The ShopBot got here about a week ago, so that was interesting. Looking forward to competition in Richmond tomorrow!

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

The bumpers are reversible, I sewed them with the seem down the middle.

The circle fits our shooter right along the edges, this is a shooter. Our circle robot is not a 1-pt dumper. Check us out at Troy, now that we have our programming worked out, your opinion will definitely change.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

It's a Battle Roomba!

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Here is a picture of our FIRST alliance ;) at the Portland Autodek Regional. In the picture is clear that we are indeed round.

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I'll second that it is indeed round, they were really fun to watch :)
The nerd inside me really loved it when they spun with their lights on :D

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

Do you have any other pictures of your shooter from a better angle? From the ones in this thread, I'm having trouble seeing how your frisbees can get the air to make it into the other goals, unless your shooter's angle is adjustable.

Re: Round Robot(s)
 

The entire top of our robot changes angle. Unfortunately I won't have pictures until the next time we open up the bag at the end of the month.