How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

My team is making a harvester and we think that a great strategy is to transfer a very high number of balls from a harvester to a good shooter quickly and safely. We think most teams will have some kind of mechanism that picks up balls from the ground, but transfering ball by dropping them on ground next to an ally shooter is not very efficient or safe, also the balls are free for opposing robots to take or move. I think most teams will have an open basket of some sort to allow human players to toss balls in. So here is the question

What shape and how big are your basket openings and how high are they positioned? And where on your robot is it?Obviously if your basket is at the 5 feet limit it is very difficult for a harvester to pass balls to you because of the height limit. I think it would help everyone to have some sort of a standard for this. This way harvesters knows what they can expect in designing a transfer mechanism and the shooters can expect good allies that can supply them with balls without worrying how they can take those balls.

So again, What shape and how big are your basket openings and how high are they positioned? And where on your robot is it?

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

whoa. attempting to standardize basket openning sizes. good idea for the HPs . but sorry, so far we have no plans to have any top opening... hm.. although it may be boring, it could be a good plan. i unno... but so far we will not be joining that idea.

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

Well we are trying to design it 60" x 60" and 60" high! :)

but once we start integrating the basket with the shooter, and the ball collector, things might change!

I don't know if we can realistically create a side loader that would work.... but it is an interesting idea!

--Mike

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

we are going with a open top loader, human player loading is gonna be kinda important.
our storage system is a secret.

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

open top, though HP loading is not going to be very easy. storage system is secret, sorry

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

I'm not asking for your storage system. If you have an opening for human players to throw balls in, how big and what size is it? and how high above the ground will be the top.

I just need to know about the top opening, which is the info needed to figure out how to effectively transfer ball from a harvester robot to a shooter robot. If this could be standardized it would make the competition a lot more interesting and another very important factor to consider when picking alliances for champianship.

If a good harvester robot is picking the alliance then the shooter I'd pick not only would have to accurate and fast, but also convinient for me to dump all the balls my harvester have collected so the team can score much higher points with those balls. Same for a shooter, you maybe be able to shoot fast and accurate but as a shooter you are only so limited with size restriction and time you don't have time and opportunity to collect all the balls you want to shoot. So you would pick a harvester that is capable of this on your alliance. This is an aspect of alliance team work that can become a huge advantage.

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

Remember that you can surely make educated guesses to improve chances: Opening will be at 60" or below, so try to 'pop' balls up to a few inches above that. Also, center of robot will be between 13 and 30 inches from an edge, and a basket opening (if there is one) will likely be within this range. So, pop a ball a few inches above 60, and out maybe 20-24 inches (you can always move away a little bit), that should cover most of the other robots out there...

Don

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

I considered this and I think popping the balls up is much like shooting, if I can implement that on a harvester design I might as well be shooting the center goal by modifying that a little bit and utilize the balls myself. Also that is hard to get it more than a few balls at a time. From the videoes and teaser a lot of teams have put out, it seems many shooters are capable of shooting a LOT of balls really fast, but they lack the ability to have that many balls consistantly throughout the match. If I could just dump say 30 balls from my harvester efficiently at that speed then it becomes a huge advantage. There is only 2minutes and 10 seconds to the game, can't waste it all transfering 50 balls one at a time.

Currently my team is trying to design a ball release system with dynamic height changes, so not only would we be able to dump all the balls we harvest into the corner goal, we can adjust it so we can dump them all into an ally shooter. However I was afraid a majority of shooters will have a 5 feet tall basket making such manuever impossible. I want to see how many teams have considered this factor and how many teams will actually have a basket opening that is say 4 feet or lower.

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

We're not using a basket so... that idea doesn't work well for us.

You may want to consider only transferring a few balls at a time, because depending on the size of the shooter, shooter robots may not be able to hold that many balls, and dumping 30 into them could cause problems.

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

ours is pvc and we can roughly hold (this is only my guess) about 60+ balls

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

how are you going to hold 60+ balls?
Have you found a rule that will let you expnd your robot on the playing field?

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

If your shooting/collecting mechanism aren't taking up too much space you can probably hold atleast 60 balls in the 28 by 38 by 60 size limit if the rest of your robot was just a big box. Also the rule says you can expand up to 5 feet by 5 feet so that's an option to increase container capacity.

However it depends on how you make it since balls don't usually stack up nicely :)

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

oh lets just say we've got a secret weapon... :D

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

The 60" cube rule does provide enough room to store 60 balls. That being said its still a giant storage device and i doubt something that large would ever fill up to its liimit(although I would love to see the match where it does.)

My team's storage area will hold about 20 balls and come up to around the 4 foot mark probably. We're trying to make it work with an opening on the top and there will be one of some kind but the size and shape of it will probably be determined mostly by weight and time. I know that due to its design while it could accept balls quickly, probably not as quickly as you're imagining and for any high speed delivery it would have to be accurately placed.

Re: How is everyone designing their basket for holding balls?
 

Make sure you read the rules. When you start you have to be in a 28"x38"x60 area, and after the starting bell rings you can be 60"x60"x60". I know with just a box made to the 28"x38"x60" dimensions you will be able to hold all 80 balls but I believe those numbers were without a drivetrain and having it rest all the way on the ground.