14" Bar Stragtegies?
 

Can anyone see any great, highly useful, strategies for a robot small enough to fit underneath the 14" clearence of the bars on the sides of the ramp?

It would give you more ways to get across, but the alley is rather small and difficult for the drivers to manuver through...

It would also be difficult to get crates OVER...

AND it makes design of the robot much more compact than a robot over 14", that would ignore the whole under 14" strategy.

BUT you can get over to the other side if the ramp is somehow blocked, either by a robot or some freak crate stack *highly improbable*

THOUGH it is a 12 foot span that only one robot cannot block with great accuracy (in my estimate).

It would be a fast robot, able to smash other people's stacks, but any robot can do that.... plus it would result in low scores for everyone.

Plus if you want to have a stacker device to stack crates, it will be very difficult to fit it into that small a chassis.

My team has been discussing this thoroughly and this is what we came up with. I'd love some feedback.

N. Horton
TEAM 840

imagine this
 

benefit = benefit of being able to fit under bar (why do i feel like i'm writing code?)

case 1:
Your ally's bot follows the line up to the boxes durring autonomy. Your opponents bot on your side does the same.
benefit: you flip into reverse and push your opponent off the line while your ally gets free reign of the boxes on the bridge.

case 2:
Your human players have a 6x stack in your scoring zone.
Your opponents bot on your side targets stacks over 3
benefit: you flip into reverse and push him into a wall and procede to defend the stack.

case 3:
The other team has 1 bot guarding the bridge and the other protecting there multiplier stack. They have enough boxes to pull of a win but only by a few.
benefit: you zip under the bar and shove a few boxes behind there scoring zone.

i'm sure there are more possibilities but it is 3:20 in the morning and my brain is fried from programming (i've already got 2 full programs and a variety of mini programs). Of course its to early to say if we will or wont be pursuing this avenue but it is food for thought. perhaps it would make a good poll...

We've just decided to walk over them.

We thought of going over them too, thank you for the feedback so far.

It does seem though that a crate stacker is out of the question then for a 14" robot, or at least made very difficult.

Besides what has been already mentioned, anyone have any "secret ideas" on the 14" problem?

you could design a forklift whose tiers would be about 12 inches tall, and have three tiers, It would be able to lift to 36 inches, and when compact, be less than 14 inche give or take a little based on your design. You would want to use a powerful slow motor to do this with, so you could lift the stack, and then drive up to a box, and lower the stack onto it, makeing the stack almost infinintly taller.
Shrey

The "alley" is approx. 6 feet wide in case anyone was wondering.

Rather than a forklift, you could always design an arm that folded down on itself to make it under the bar. Something similar to Team 67's bot in 2001 as shown in the attached picture.

If we told, they would'nt be secret, now would they?:cool:

We decided to go under so we have more possibilities and have a stacker. Thanks for the feedback all.:D

Our team also decided to go with the short stacker. Could be interesting... Should be like a car engine, you have to remove 5 other parts to fix another one :P

You can make quite long arms and still fit under the bar. I think you can stack 5 high from the top using a robot that can go under. (That is a 72 inch reach) Long arms with extending pieces or an over the top grabber like the picture shown above of the 2001 game. There are ways to also drop box like robots under but i'm keeping those a secret!

im not trying to be mean but as it is late can you tell me what you were trying to say here im trying to think of ways to "drop box like robots under" but im not haveing any luck

i had a simple idea to allow a robot to be able to steel a stack of bins, and fit under the bar, but not at the same time. imagine that on one side of the robot there is a scissor mechanism powered by one piston. it compacts to only a few inches and can extend to several feet. now, if there were "fingers" for gripping the bins attached to each of the outer joints (the ones that dont form an X), the scissor mechanism could extend upward, while moving the fingers closer together at the same time. if designed right, it could easily fit within 14 inches and be able to clamp onto about four boxes. however there is one problem: the fingers would have to be extendable so that they dont break the size limit of the robot. to solve this, i imagined using another scissor thing, at right angles to the other one, and connected to the middle joints (the ones that do form an X), and a rod connected to the outer joints of that would move closer and farther from the plane of the orignial scissor to extend the fingers, similar to how to fingers move closer and away from eachother.

this is kind of a hard idea to grasp without a visual aid, but it just might work.

why!!!!!?????? Take at what's below....which probably will happen.


your robot [bins in alley] bar
ramp......................
[bins in alley] bar

you can't go anywhere but over the ramp...if you can !!!!!!!;)

That, as well as many other reasons is why we are not going under the bar.

Heck, we've even thought of dropping a couple boxes in the alley to stop people from going through.

So here's a start/design idea (and im curious how'd youd get around this problem to):

The evil Team 783 ;) has just dropped a box or 2 on either side of the bar. You have been blocked from going under (cause the boxes can't be pushed under or out of the way). What do you do?

Really, you could only do 2 things:
1. Hope the other bar hasn't been blocked (what if it has?)
2. Go over the ramp (assuming you can)