Driver Practice w/ Old Robots
 

Alright just wondering who all is having the chance to practice with old robots from previous years before their own regionals, here we are getting to practice with Jari II ('01 MMR Champion Alliance Member) and Ace (3rd Place @ 2000 Nationals) Jari has the tread drive and Ace has the wheels..its good practice (except running into walls=bad) Just curious.....

We can't
 

For the last three years we have been using two drill motor four wheel drive, straight bread and butter. But this year we decided to make our lives much harder and go with swerve drive. Bad thing is, its really hard to drive and we never had a chance to practice with it. So our driver has to learn how to use it in the practice matches. Ouch. So needless to say we have no robot to practice with.

We've converted Old MOE's drive train to a close duplicate of the one on MOEhawk. Its just mounted to some BOSCH aluminum framing on Old MOE - who had to get weighted down a bit. Our driver has been practicing a lot and I think this helps a lot at competitions.

this year we built 2 identical robots, 1 to ship, 1 to practice with.

WE also built 2 robots, we also modified our robot from 2 years ago with the yellow and black balls. So we can have 2 robots running at once.

We have used a tank drive every year. TOBOR II used the same drive (tank drive, no treads) as TOBOR V, so we actually used TOBOR II as somewhat of a prototype for TOBOR V. We got the drive up and running, then temporarily replaced TOBOR II's drill motors with this year's Chiphua motors to see how the drive would run, if it could pull what we needed, etc. It worked fairly well. We used TOBOR II (rather than III or IV) as a prototype because TOBOR IV had treads and TOBOR III had two wheels and two casters; both II and V use four wheels, tank drive, no treads. Getting TOBOR II running was pretty exciting and now we know the drives from TOBOR II, TOBOR III, TOBOR IV (and of course) TOBOR V work! ;) I guess we could practice with TOBOR II, if we wanted to... But while the drive works the same way, a lot of things are different (motors, etc.) so we haven't used TOBOR II to practice driving at all.

- Katie

We weighed down Condor (118's 2001 machine) with about 100 extra pounds of stuff, as well as one of our prototype goal grabbers. It was helpful for our drivers to compete against another robot in practice, but Condor rarely won.

Weve had our 2001 robot hauling a goal around for the past few weeks. A lot of the ppecs are really similar to this years bot, so it makes for good practice. However, i would like to say that tying the robot to the goal with rope and a two by four is NOT the best course of action...lol

I attend a vocational school and the calss changes every year. The robot from late years class was completley taken appart by our calss this year. So we had only a about 10min of total driving pratice before we got to VCU. We also learned that you should pick ONE driver before you even get to the competition. We did not and some of my team mates felt like they were being left out. Well I hope next years class has more time to pratice than us!:D

Michael D.
Team 602