Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Nice, actually, I'm pretty small and back in 06 I was about 5' and 105 lbs. That was my idea, cover myself in tinfoil and go out on the field. Last year I grew a few inches, and put on about 5 lbs, so I was going to have to sit on a tricycle. This year, I could make it work if I had a 5 lb tricycle.....Plan B anyone? Totally autonomous robot....Innovation in Control....
Malhon

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

we had a ramp that we deployed on the back of ours, where the ball would roll up it...but it took the ball to be rolling at about 20mph:D and a hover-bot. And a giant speaker hooked to a iPod only playing Metallica........ bow-bowbowBOWbow-bow-bowbowBOWbow

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

beam me up, Scotty!
:D :D :D

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

I seem to remember an idea kicking around during a brainstorming session with team 190 back in 2k3. Something named "wall genie", that could lift all the boxes off of the ramp at once, still stacked, while having no wheels and not moving the entire match. Numbers were crunched over a couple days until it was finally revealed that the amount of force that would have been applied to the field elements would lift the entire field off the ground.

Maybe you had to be there.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Right now I'm sitting in our design meeting looking at the white-boards and I look across the boards and the designs are making sense and look like proper robots. All of a sudden I get to a small section of the board and its a giant Mickey Mouse hand that is attached to the robot and just pokes all the balls around. A girl on our team, Amelia, gets the credit for that one. I'm practically dying of sickness and it made me laugh for a good 5 minutes.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

The idea came up of literally putting a boot on the front of our robot to kick trackballs around. It quickly ended up on our "Never to be thought of for the robot again" list, which gets written on the board every time we talk design.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

w thougt of a couple funny ones this year, one of them being a bot that uses the trackball to travel (by jumping on top of it and rolling it around), cannons were thought of and we also decided that if we could ge Chuck Norris' fist, he ould launch the ball for us.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

i say we build a cage

:rolleyes: or maybe a fan?

crazy ideas and our crazy name
 

we have looked at a crane like the stuffed animal games but realized its claw would be over 40 inches in diameter at some points and that that is larger than our robots lenth and width restrictions

we have named our fork lift bot THE SPORKBOT in a weird chain of events
go 2075

Re: crazy ideas and our crazy name
 

flying dragon

That actually came out in of our design meeting...we had a drawing and everything

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

As a fundraiser this year we sold these little robotic bugs called Hexbugs, which feel their way around with antennas and react to sound. We calculated that by using the full 28 by 38 inch start dimensions, enough hexbugs would fit to support more than 120 lbs. As such, we could eliminate our drive train completely, using only the bugs glued to a sheet of polycarb for locomotion. It would also be extremely lightweight. Brilliant!

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Hahaha, I remember that, Matt. It was pretty kickin'... But the Das Vings of Doom were just as good :)

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

So one of our team members (one known for having oddball ideas) was presenting an idea of his to the team. It involved a claw that could pick up the ball, and set it on top of the flat part of the arm, on a platform attached to a bungee. Then a pneumatic would lift the platform up to 45 degrees and that would put tension in the bungee. Then we release a catch and the bungee makes the ball go flying.

At some point in his presentation, I say "So it's basically a giant crossbow, right?"

Funny stuff.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

The silliest we came up with was the ground-height to over the overpass catapult. We'd need impossibly absurd amounts of energy to make that work.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

we had the idea of building a spring loaded catapult that fires once each round. After we get a robot that can drive, maybe that idea will come back.