pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

Was it considered to be "in your possession" with this? cause that would suck

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

we had that problem too in one of our matches. i think we were too stuck on it to be able to get another ringer so we didnt get a penalty. that is a good question, i'd try to get rid of it just in case.

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

We had this happen to us a BMR and it was counted as in possession so we could not score any more. It didn't matter anyways as we could barley move.

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

This also happened at Florida Regional. The robot was disabled because it ended up having 3 tubes around its exposed wheels. One blue ringer, one red, and a spoiler, lol. The robot was not allowed to attend any more matches until they fixed their problem. They ended up putting bumpers around their entire robot to prevent it from happening again.

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

We were able still able to drive around and score and as far as I know we were not penalized. Our driver was more careful so we never wrapped a tube around the wheel this bad again, however we still killed a lot of tubes. One of the field personnel asked us at the end of Friday if we could try not to tear up so many tubes as they were concerned that they would run out of tubes. We double checked the frame and found no sharp edges, so we decided to add bumpers and this helped a lot.

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

Wait, what was popping the tubes?

Chris

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

We are not sure what was popping the tubes, maybe we missed something. Our wheels protrude in front of our frame to make it easier to climb a ramp, so the wheel will contact a tube before the frame will. Our wheels have Rough Top conveyor belt for the tread and this grips the tubes very well. When we run over a tube, I think that it gets pinched between the wheel and the frame and then gets punctured. Once it starts to lose pressure, It is even easier for the tube to get sucked in and if the driver does not reverse, the tube can get completely wrapped around the wheel. The addition of bumpers helped a lot, but I think that any exposed wheel drive train will have the potential for this problem.

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

That is extremely unfortunate!

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

I know that on our robot, our wheels would drive on top of the tube, and in a desperate attempt to get off of the tube, the robot would back up. But the tube would grab hold of our wheels, and deflate under them so that our wheels had no choice but to rip the tube to get it off. Gosh those tubes must want to commit suicide!

Re: pic: 662 gets a tube wrapped around the wheel
 

Hehe, this was nothing compared to practice matches. Before we put those side bars on there were 4 posts just sticking on up. In one practice match there was a ringer on each one... 2-3 of them were deflating, and the robot started to move kind of funny as the deflated rings got into the wheels. Good thing it wasn't a real match with penalties. After that, side bars kind of became a priority :)