Are you using bumpers?
 

So, who here is planning on making bumpers for your robot?

Bumpers are currently not part of our design or plans. After our first regional that might change.

Why not? It doesn't count for the 30x36 box, and it's so easy to add. I don't even know if ours would need it, but an impact reduction of around 12x sounds good to me.

Why not? It still counts against your weight.
The aluminum/steel/polycarb on the robot already look like swiss cheese and we need to lose weight, AND the teather isn't on it yet...

I wonder...
 

I wonder if bumpers will be popular this year... A lot of veteran teams I talked to realize how intense the matches will be, especially during finals. And I heard them saying, bumpers will be needed.

To rookie teams: Please seriously consider using bumpers if you want your robot in one piece after competition, which is especially important for fund raising and showing off your robot at malls or science fairs.

Chances are, a decent amount of teams are using more than drill motors for their drive train, and you don't want to be hit when those robots are coming at you 10 feet/sec.

Which reminds me of a question: What material do teams out there use for their bumpers?

We use high density foam. We use it in all of our Road Cases for our equipment we have that goes on the road where I work (I work in the stage lighting indistry). It is very light weight, and can take a large impact. I then coat the foam with something called Flexcoat, which is manufactured by Rosco. It is basically like a rubber coating for foam that helps to prevent the foam from getting ripped up by sharp edges.

Bumpers! We don't need no stinkin' bumpers!

EPP is also a good material. I think EPP stands for Expanded Polypropolene.
I use EPP to pack my radio gear in my R/C airplanes. It doen't transfer vibrations to the radio like foam rubber does.
It can also take a lot of abuse. Guys in our club build planes out of the stuff. You can take a glider and slam it into the ground and the plane will just bounce with no damage.

Wayne Doenges

Uh...
 

Call me naive, but weren't they going to supply us with some kind of attachable bumpers at the regional competition?

Re: Uh...
 

I have not heard anything about this. However, I do think that the variaty of diffrent robot designs would preclude a standard bumper.

No, they don't provide any sort of bumpers.

You have to produce them yourself and they need to be detatchable if your robot will be more then 30x36 with them on. And bumpers are cool, no matter what people say. A working robot is a cool robot. A robot scattered into 2 or 4 pieces on the fiel isn't cool.

It is really cool when the pieces are intended to move about indepentandly though.:)
Teathered without risk of entanglement, of course.;)