what kind of design are people going for?
 

What kind of strat did your team pick (if it has chosen one):

King of the hill: Focus on trying to control the top of the ramp for you and your teammate, try to block the opponent's passage.

Stacker: Focus on making as many and as large of stacks as possible.

Pusher: Focus on trying to push as many containers into your zone as you can and pushing crates out of opponent's zone. No way of lifting containers off of the ground.

Lifter: Like pusher but picks up the containers while moving them.

tosser: Focus on throwing crates in order to get them from the enemy's zone into your zone as quickly as possible, even if the ramp is being blocked. Also, possibility throwing a crate to knock down opponent's stacks.

Defender: Focus on keeping your collected points safe from sabatoge.

Stack stealer: not able to build a stack, but capable of moving it into your zone once an opponent has built one.

Combination: Has no clear leaning twoards only one of these categories

Other: Something I forgot to put or never thought of

Also, are you going to be able to go under/over the side rails?
Please discuss why you chose your design over others. If you haven't decided, wait until you do.

Our team has decided to build a pusher that may be modified to be a king of the hill if we have the time. We decided that adding container handling appendages would be too much effort for an uncertain gain. Why build a stack when it can just get knocked down? Tossing would be too difficult for us to build.

Ok -- options are fixed. Vote away. :)

id be interested to see how this changes by the end of the build

Is there anyway to allow people vote for more than one? I can already see a combination of a few of those options in the poll...

There's an option called "Combination" near the bottom.

personaly, i am pushing my idea of a wedge for our team. but our entire team needs to vote on it, so it might be scrapped.


Bad

Our team right now is looking at a small scale stacker (4-5 bins) short enough to go under the side bars. Likely going to change by shipping date. Anybody want to talk about how their robot is going to handle hitting the ramp? It's only 15 degrees, but I think that's lifting the middle of your robot 2.5 inches (if you're 36 inches long). Bonus points for addressing hitting at a angle.

30 people have voted for combination, but that's quite vague. It's pointless to answer the question if you're not going to tell people what your answer is. So please describe your combinations.

are you talking about having something push out of your robot and making it immovable?.......so you can be the king of the hill? :) (that's what my team thought of too, but..........it said in the rules that you weren't allow to render your robot immovable by sticking out clamps from your robot

MWAHAHAHAHA... We will do ALL of the above! (hopefully...)

Giant multi use armed robot. the arms would stack, act as pusher arms extending our width by their length, and they would be able to throw a crate across the field. That is just my idea, which i stole and ran with from somebody else. The robot should also be able to limbo(go under the bar) and be stronger than every other robot, or atleast able to push them.... that covers most of that ^_^

Our team has been going a lot more smoothly than expected in the making of a working prototype robot... we have a good probability be done with the drive system and most of the frame well before two weeks is over. This will give us plenty of time to add all kinds of stuff, so I'm changing my vote to combination. Thank FIRST for these pre-made drive trains... I don't think anyone except for some rookie teams will be building just a basic robot this year.

I really should've added an "all of the above" option... oh well. Now we'll never know how many of those combinations are intending to be super-bots.

my team ruled out on stacking. that was thrown out probably the second day. ah wells... we agreed that we plan on lifting and manovering the bins. we're opting for a combo design though. maybe a little of pushing, defending, and breaking of stacks.

could you please cite this?

Think he ment that you can't grab onto the side bar or intentally grab onto another robot to control them.

Also our robot looks to be combination. Unsure as of now what 2 special functions we are picking.

That's why I asked if the vote can be changed to let people casting more than one vote, as the option "combination" tells people absolutely nothing they want to know from the vote caster.

The poll could've been a list of check boxes that let people check multiple options at once, so at least the people aren't limited to one answer without using combination.

What i meant by a "wedge" was if you look at a profile of a 3 ring binder, it forms a wedge, now if u can support where the binder makes a 90 degree angle, u can make the top flappy peice be able to knock down boxes then plant yourself on the bridge using a large rubber foot, then fold the flappy thing back down, and u make a ramp to piggy back another robot

]
Bad:yikes:

I'm hoping ours will be a supersimple stacker with king o the hill capabilities. We're making a "frictionometer" to test different methods and materials on the HDPE. And translational drive would be really really fun to build!

lauren

What advantage do people see of going under the bar?

Launcher

Ours also will go through the bar

Now, how can you manage that?

You have an alternate way of getting to the other side of the field if the ramp is blocked....

when i hear that i think of the bad terminator in terminator 2. that would be cool but i think maybe that the intelligent metal he was made out of might be considered exotic hence not allowed.

my team was thinking of a box pusher, with the ability to do small stacks (our stacks would be maybe 3 or 4 high)

yeah but if I throw a few bins in front of you...you can't go past.

ramp

you're here [bins] bar other side.....

we thought about it too...you also can't grab the top of the bar...its in the rules (we have a best on it Wednesday next week).

Well, we basically finialized our idea of what we want to do about an hour ago....and It's definately a combonation of a few things.

Our main objective is to build stacks (max height of 8 at the moment), however we are also building in the ability to steal and carry stacks (also up to a height of 8). Our support will be pnumatically controlled to compensate for going up/down the ramp when we are stealing stacks.

We will also be contending for King of the Hill - a powerful drive train will be in place no matter what else we do (gear-box w/ high and low gears). With that drive train, we also will be able to defend stacks, and/or attack stacks.

Our bot obviously won't be fitting under the side bars.

Here is a formula to tell you the center clearance required to not hit the frame while moving from ramp to platform:
CC= Center clearance required
B= base distance between axles
a= angle of ramp (14.48 deg in our case)
r= radius of your wheels


CC = (B/2)sin(a/2) - r(1/cos(a/2) - 1)

Maybe I shold have posted this in the technical forum?

yeah definately. i understood none of it:ahh:

yeah maybe you should re post it in a techincal discussion. But thanks for the info. We're pursuing our two speed Mark II. Gearbox, a buldozer type pusher/stacker endeffector on the end of an arm connected to a shoulder joint.

Also, if the bot on the other side of the bar is following the line in autonomous mode, going under the bar allows you to quickly knock them off the line, in effect disabling them for at least the first 15 seconds of play, if not completely destroying their strategy.

I personally wanted to create a robot who's sole purpose was to launch a non-lethal virus into the RC of the opponent robots, hitting them with the dreaded blue screen of death. But then I thought to myself, "How would I ever be able to stack any bins?"

So I scrapped that idea.

a simple design.:)

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF S.P.A.M.!

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

WE WILL WE WILL S.P.A.M. YOU!

Brute force as true to S.P.A.M. as we can get....just shove the bot into overdrive....

Speed, Power, And Maneuverability is what we always do right!

I was rooting for the "HuckBot" at first (i.e. the day the rules were posted). However, examination of the boxes made this less viable than I would like. It's going to be kind of difficult to get a platform under a stack of boxes without knocking it over. Also, the initial position of the robots makes it more difficult.

over the bar
 

we were thinking about going over the bar.... but we passed on that one.. made out center of grav too high

as of now 1077 is going to have a box that can move around. hopefully in the end we will have an arm that works as well

somebody needs to inform those teams wtill building a lifter:D :rolleyes:

So much to do, so little time....
 

We will be pusher!
We will be lifter!
We will be tosser!

We are currently drive train with no end effector!
We ship in one week!

[Sob]

Aren't the results of this poll going to be invalid since multiple members of one team could vote and therefore skewing the data? For example if 40 members of my team all logged in on there own and voted for what our robot does. That's 39 more votes than is required.

HAZZAH! Our robot can do everything.... except throw boxes, we thought this was too dangreous, however with quick motor and sprocket change, we would probably be able to throw stacks of four boxes at a time! did I mention we can switch gears, and tow a mini-van:cool:

Stack, orient, steal stack, go under the bar, nest bins, koth.

we designed our robot to stack, clear zones, to limbo, and to be robust and stay on the ramp. At the Buckeye regional we had to change our strategy alot. We came thinking that the only way that you could win would be by making a stack. We discovered that we could win without making 1 stack. We won 7 out of 7 matches scoring under 100 points only one time , which by the way a score of 93 plus or minus a couple of points. We basically won by attacking the stacks on the ramp and playing king of the hill.

We chose the stacker, and we sit a record with it. 6 boxes. w00t w00t!

stacker
 

i noticed how no one actually stacks. The stacks gets knocked down when its made. Are robot can hold. Us the gaelhawks are pretty good at stacking.

Nobody Stacks
 

Our team decided on a "U" shaped bot, with arms (that we found to be modular) that can stack, go under the bar, push, defend, and knock over other stacks.

A little bit of everything
 

Well, we, of course, have a multi-purpose robot, which I'm sure those of you who have seen us know. We push, we can stack, we go under the bar, and we play a good king of the hill. No, we don't launch boxes... But I don't think we really need to.

As for going under the bar, in the matches I have seen, it has proven to be a great mobility bonus. It is relatively common for a robot to block off the ramp, and these "limbo" robots often zip around and under the bar. As for totes in the way, well, smash them into a million pieces. I didn't mean that of course, just move them out of the way. :)

Stacking is something that is not being done that much. It is very true that the stacks seem to always get knocked down, so even if you can stack, it's either pointless, or too time consuming. We have not stacked all of the time, but we have stacked a few times when it was going to make a nice point bonus and we knew we had time. Does anyone know of any reliable internal stacking robots?

I really think that push power is the most used thing in this year's competition. Robots often "butt heads", and being the stronger robot is always a good thing. Plus it's nice to be able to move massive amounts of totes at one time.

Combination == 47.74%
 

Notice the "winning" percentage!

A palindromic reflection of the number 47!!!

Could this be a sign of things to come?

AKA - a MARTUS-ism? :D