Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Assuming we're going with the same basic design:

• Decouple the pickup and shooter mechanisms. Our shooter springs were inside the arms that had our pickup rollers on the end, and this caused much weirdness when we wanted to pickup with the shooter cocked. If we had to redo it, I'd have gone with a more standard linear punch than our slingshot design.
• Remove the open/close of the shooter/pickup claw. This didn't get us much except the ability to catch, which we never used once, and a LOT of headaches with our lead screw and sensor. We could probably figure out how to make it able to shoot and pickup with changing the openness of the claw.

In other words, I'd try and make our robot a lot more like the H.O.T. Team's bot - they certainly seemed to be one of the most effective implementations of the two-sided pivoting claw/arm/pickup/shooter design this year (which very few teams seemed to do!). Ultimately our biggest problems were trying to do too much and making our systems too integrated to the point that if one function failed, many others would as well.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Our sweet spot was carefully designed to be from against the low goal, to 36" (+ a bit) back from the low goal. Also our shot was designed to leave the front of the bot 60" in the air. Few things made me happier than those times when we shifted into low gear, pushed a defender into the low goal, and then scored over their heads :D

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

We underestimated the weighting of assist points. I wish that our robot could have passed the ball back through its intake, instead of having to shoot it out. We also had a very short distance between tie points for our elastic bands. If we had used a longer distance I think our accuracy/precision would have greatly increased.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

I think one aspect we wish we could change is our ability to spit the ball back out onto the floor for a mouth to mouth pass. Once the ball is fully in our shooter it needs to be shot out of which we can do a full powered shot, soft shot, and a nice 1 point dump into the hopper of another robot. There were many times where we planned for the mouth to mouth and partially sucked the ball onto our bumper but once it was fully in the ring it was coming out through a pickup.

There are a few instances where it would have helped our strategy but what it mainly hurt was how teams ranked our robot which I felt contributed to us falling so low in the pickings in our division. We ended up working with three amazing robots and even if we didn't make it as far as Einstein I wouldn't have traded the experience we got from working with Nemesis, Torque, and Winnovation but we know the fact we couldn't spit it out once it was inbounded caused a lot of teams to second guess our robot being on their alliance.

This wasn't just a championship thing we noticed it all season when partners gave us a funny look that we couldn't spit out of our shooter. While designing we had prototyped our pickup that it could grab the ball and pull it out or use the back pickup to help push it to the front roller but once the final robot was assembled the ring had a different geometry than was prototyped.

Just like last year even though our robot was crazy and we may have missed some key concepts in the game like ground pickup was better than 20 extra climb points in 2013 or quick low passes coupled with some nice long catapult shots is better than accurately being able to throw the ball to your partners or yourself. In the end I still support our 2013 and 2014 robot designs as they keep pushing our team to do crazier things (that work!), set us apart from your everyday robots, and have their own elegance coupled with simplicity.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Adding to this, I would have preferred metal springs on the robot instead of the elastic spring we used. It was too sensitive to heat difference (even between practice field and game field) and required a huge amount of effort to keep dialed in. I also would have gone to 6WD sooner in the year, rather than waiting until Championships to make the swap. Passing was key, and we didn't design for it.

Oh, and our bumpers + bumper mounts were trash all year long, even after 4x iterations between events.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

We would have added a way to do a shot from in front of the low goal, and a way to potentially pass the ball. Overall, we were very happy with how the robot performed. We actually never had any problems with surgical tubing this year, and the surgical tubing at championships was the same that was on the robot before bag day.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Correct me if I'm wrong. but you have the surgical tubing running under the entire length of the robot when stretched right? I think that if we had done that our shooter would have been more consistent.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

It was about 4 inches when slack, and about 10 when fully stretched.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

For the most part I think we had a good design this year. (Double intake that worked really good) I do not think we played to our strenghts and execuated strategies like we should have.

1. No Mecanum drive, never ever again- getting pushed around stinks. With that we are currently working on our first WCD for an offseason project.

2. Not having to turn sideways to shoot. Caused us to not have reliable auto.

3. Improving ease of bumper mounting. Hopefully the WCD will change this.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

If I could do it over (with the same general robot design) I'd probably try to get a roller intake on my robot. Our forklift worked decently well, but a better intake would have made our robot so much stronger.

As far as strategy goes, I would have had my team/alliances start passing back the inbound to the human player during our first regional, rather than at SVR.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Wide robot config.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

I can't complain much considering that we are walking away with 3 blue banners, and a division finalist

Things I would have changed:
-Use wheels with tread
we used kitbot wheels and they wore down so much we needed to replace them every competition, we have gone thru 36 wheels this year.
-Shifting Gearbox
we were neither fast or slow so we couldn't push thru or run around defense making it hard to get to our sweet spot.
-be able to shoot with collector and shoulder in
our robot had the shooter actuate outside the frame to provide more room for longer arms. This caused G28 calls in our first two evens(wasn't a problem in 3-5th) we originally decided that we needed the ball to be touching the intake so we could eject the ball but we have seen some clever ball ejection mechanisms.
-faster intake gearbox
our gearing was perfect for our two ball auto but it would have been nice to pick up a little faster in teleop

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Our robot this year was an octogan. I would not have made it an octogan.