Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

There are many design challenges in deciding where the ball should exit the robot (for 3pt goal scoring purposes). Where do you have it exiting? If you selected high, can you please explain the route the ball takes (all the mechanisms it goes through) to get to the exit point? Thanks.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

The ball is released from the storage and launched towards the back of our robot by three wheels of increasing speed. Then it runs on a track which directs it from the bottom of the robot and launches it from the top of the robot shooting forward.
pretty nice setup though. low center of gravity and we can change the angle of the launcher.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Okay I'm scared, really scared. Since when do teams know what their main scoring mechanism is going to be in week 2! :ahh:

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

How can you not know by now? You need to start ordering parts and such, or you won't have any time to build...

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Ours goes out the top... in any direction. ;) I'm not 100% on the design of it though. It's changed about 50 times since we originally voted on the design.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

We've decided the ball should launch out of the side of our robot, and could possibly be on a turret of some sort (this turret will not allow 360 degree rotation though).

The current plan is to also have it leave the robot high up. The ball will be picked off the ground by a conveyor belt and roll through a slightly angled trough (similar to the chutes that move gumballs in gumball machines) to our shooter, where there will be some sort of stopper to prevent balls from automatically rolling into the shooter and firing. The prevailing idea for the actual shooter is to then have the balls roll underneath a rotating wheel, and be carried around the wheel so that they fire out above the wheel in the opposite direction. So the two lifting mechanisms will be the conveyor belt and the shooter itself.

The actual shooter has changed in design every few days though, so the shooter might change again, but the rest should stay the same.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Blasted. No option to pick multiple places in the survey?

What's up with that?

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

who said anythign about a MAIN scoring method?

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

I agree. We'll be dumping from the back and shooting from the side. Assuming we get it all to work and work together. This is a common problem I'm having with polls - our robot usually incorporates a mix of possible answers. Maybe we should name this year's bot "melting pot".

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

We're planning on a ball hopper connected to a turret with ~180 deg turning ability, we already built up a mock up and now we need to tone down the robot because it already shoots balls too fast
by week 2 you should already have some design done to eliminate week 5 headaches (2k4... grrrr...)

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

If you shoot from the top your half way there.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Yeah, I would very much like to be done with designing our main scoring method, but we're still testing a bunch of methods. I pretty much have no idea what our robot is even vaguely going to look like. (except the chassis (and the controls))

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

The ball will be exiting the robot above 5 feet (or very close to there) and towards the front. This is accomplished by a mid-height baseball shooter at the back of the robot shooting forward and angled up significantly.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Ball goes up, round round round round round round round round and then appears at the bottom of the robot. And then gets shot out the side. Hu???

Any ideas on what 1072's robot will look like? A hint: a lot of fiberglass was used.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

I'm envisioning a nautilus design, maybe in keeping with the theme of the FLL challenge?

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Sounds like a gumball machine

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Heh, close. More like... a roller coaster.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Team 1163 is examining and prototyping a design based on a round hay bailer. Different companies built many of these machines and the system is familiar to the students on the team.

Re: Where does the ball exit your robot?
 

Wow! Sounds like a lot of different ideas...right now, we're considering having the ball shot out of the top or or the bottom, but there are advantages and disadvantages to both. if you have it shot from the top, your robot will most likely be top heavy, and could tip easily (not good for climbing the ramp.) If its on the bottom, then it will provide a low center of gravity, but could easily be blocked. hmmm....

we're thinking of having the ball come out the top of our robot, but having it shot from the bottom/middle...we'll see how that works :ahh: