stationary robot
 

Is any team build a stationary robot? with no drivetrain, that placed on the scoring platforme?

Re: stationary robot
 

While there were teams that had stationary Robots in Aerial Assist (Dirty Birds, Team 213) that only climbed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkrQIn3Orqs

I doubt that a stationary Robot would be effective in any way for Recycle Rush.

Could you please provide more details about a stationary Robots strategy this year?

Re: stationary robot
 

You could do a claw bot, that can rotate around the base to pick up totes and stack?

Re: stationary robot
 

A machine that could sit next to the chute and deploy a conveyor belt to move totes to the closer scoring platform would be great to see. It would be complex, but also require little movement. Such a machine could potentially stack as fast as it is loaded.

Re: stationary robot
 

We didn't end up building it, but we did consider the possibility of an immobile stacker.

As for immobile strategy, I imagine it would follow something of this pattern:

Three viable positions to place your immobile robot - between the landfill and the far scoring platform, by a human player station, or on/by a scoring platform. The Landfill position would be useful for grabbing bins off the step or clearing the landfill, and would probably require a robot to move the stacks your immobile stacker created onto a scoring platform*. The HP position would be the kind of immobile stacker that loaded totes from the HP and spit out a completed stack, unmoving from the station. This would also require a robot to take the stacks the immobile stacker creates and put them on a scoring platform*. Finally, if you've placed your stacker on or near a scoring platform, then you'd have a feeder robot bring you totes while the immobile stacker makes really high stacks.

I'm not sure how capping a stack would work with this, it might mean using that third robot to purely litter bins and cap stacks. In that case, they need to be able to lift really high with the bin, because the whole advantage of the immobile stacker is the ability to build really high stacks, and you only have so many bins, so a bunch of short stacks can't all be capped.


* This would be tricker than it sounds - the stack mover has to make sure nothing falls over while they're transporting the stack.

Re: stationary robot
 

WIth an immobile setup, it would probably be easier to transport single totes and stack at the platform end. Include some rails to keep the stacks on the scoring platform, and shove the whole stack out, pushing any previous stacks along with it.

Re: stationary robot
 

I absolutely agree. Didn't think of the conveyor belt-esque scoring, but a feeder bot will have a much easier time with one or two totes at a time than 6. I could see some of the stacks turning as they're pushed along, though. Perhaps the feeder bot would also have to help the immobile stacker with that?

Re: stationary robot
 

We actually designed a conveyor with a robot on a rail system whose goal was to take all 30 totes from the human player and stack them in stacks of five or six, whatever our alliance partners needed. The conveyor would deliver the stacks to the robot, with a vertical lift. The robot would be perpendicular to the conveyor. We would only be on the right hand side of the field (relative to the player station).

After much discussion with many many teams and coaches, we decided that although this design is cool and outside of the box, we would be hard pressed to find the ideal partners until at least MAR champs, but likely worlds. There would of course be an alliance that would find a team who quickly makes 5 stacks of six from the human player, but the downside of not moving during auto or being able to do the cans unless someone fed them to us was concerning. Our feeling was we would rank low during qualifiers and never be doing the picking. We couldn't leave it up to chance.

If we had a larger team, we actually considered spending $5K and putting a group of students on it with two engineers and building it to compete in MAR. It would just take a considerable amount of machining time and we would have to make that team work from 1 am to 5 am. :)

Re: stationary robot
 

I'm not sure that a robot without a drivetrain would be legal.

Without a drivetrain it may not be able to fulfill the 'movement' requirement.

Personally, I'd Q&A this ... as I'd love to see a stationary crane or conveyor this year.

Re: stationary robot
 

No where in that rule does it say that the entire robot needs to be moving with respect to the field. It simply says a robot must have some sort of movement. I feel that a conveyor or claw moving in relation to the robot would satisfy this requirement, but it could definitely go either way with a Q&A.

Re: stationary robot
 

The answer to Q300 confirms that a robot doesn't have to be able to leave its starting location in order to satisfy the "movement" requirement.

Re: stationary robot
 

i've seen one of these in the israeli week 0 last thursday. they won by a landslide

Re: stationary robot
 

Care to share some more information? Maybe pictures if the team involved is okay with that?

Re: stationary robot
 

i think you'll need to wait for the 17th

Re: stationary robot
 

That was the Utimate Ascent game actually :) , my team had some thoughts about an unfolding/unrolling conveyor belt that would sit against the feeder station...instead we went with something else