Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

I'm sure every team has come up with some pretty ridiculous designs. Those overtly comedic designs put forward soley to make a funny. What are the ridiculous designs your team has come up with?

Our most ridiculous design has, so far, been the concept of "Injecting the hamsters." I'm fairly certain no one has ever... EVER uttered that sentence(except us.) We also joked about a helicopter design, except we realized it would still need bumpers on it. We solved that problem by making the blades the bumpers, so I guess magic would make it fly.

So what are your ridiculously wacky designs?

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Well, i can't remember a specific ridiculous design now, but am sure everybody wanted to paint themselves in silver paint n pretend you are the bot!


Things would be so much easier!

hahahaha, jk ^^

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

We havn't thought of too many this year, but we had a funny one last year. We considered making a 6' robot that would drive to infront of the opposing player's station it would unfold to the maximum length and block the driver's view. We decided it wasn't very graciously professional.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

A giant caaage :D

lol jk

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a 120lbs person who can toss the ball over the overpass. Now if only we could figure out how to get a person to run on battery instead of food...

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It's a running joke on our team about a member that, in 2006, wanted a giant hand to shoot the poof balls "Kobe" style.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

This year we had stuff ranging from giant vacuums to pinball machines. Not to wildly exciting though.

Last year we had one, which I was the main advocate of, that is best described as a "swiss army bot." Basically everything unfolded out of a tiny cube.

I still get grief about that today...:rolleyes:

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Hahahaha we had the helicopter thing too.

But our wackiest was a launcher....where the ball completely fits inside a pipe, and we use air to launch it. That would be one huge pipe...and a lot of air pressure

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Just in passing I suggested that we try to disguise this really good soccer player that is at our school as our robot. He could probably control that thing with his feet, or not to think about it his nose, no problem. But that is only a dream I guess

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For this year's game, a "Motorcycle bot". 2 wheels.

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Our robot could fly in 2005, it just 2min 17s to get enough speed to lift off.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

one kid on our team, mike, always comes up with...

THE SOUP BOT
a robot that has a giant pot and fresh meat and veggies. it chops them up and puts them in a pot of boiling water. the problem is to make the soup during a 2:15min match and then dispense it to the referees. Because what referee doesn't want fresh soup.

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A hovercraft bot would be totally possible, but I would hate to see it perform in a pushing match.

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i always suggest building a tractor beam, hey it works in star trek, why not in FIRST? ;)

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I would like to see someone design and build a robot that can find a particular loophole in the physics of space and time such that it can run a ridiculous number of laps in auton and regular play. :D

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

I had thought of something similar, but a little more wacky. Instead of motorcycle, more like a tricycle. The electronics are housed ina thin tall and long box. sticking out the front is a wheel on a servo that can rotate. on the back are two powered wheels sticking out at an angle (about 15 degrees) on the end of pistons. When the tricycle speeds around a turn, the inside piston retracts so the tricycle 'banks' through the turn. Someone later pointed out to me that i wont even need the right piston because we'll only be turning left :-)

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

My favorite design was basically we somehow load the ball into a bowl like structure on a pole going out the back of our bot, the pole would be able to rotate probably 90 degrees so in the end it could be vertical. so we pick up the ball and line up a few feet away from the overpass. four pneumatic actuator things extend from the corners of the bot lifting it a couple feet in the air. the front actuators close violently throwing the ball forward over the overpass.

My idea... if only it didn't violently shake the base of the robot and make the base fall roughly two feet

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Helicopter bot... If you could somehow pull that off and if it could hold the ball, that would be so freaking effective.

Hummmmmm... lol

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

well last year we had the idea to release a monke on to the rack so no one could score

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

We thought about building a PORTAL gun for this years game. We did mock ups of the bot with it and everything, we would have the game controller be a USB mouse and attach a 5 in game screen to the control panel. Yeah... we decided that the laws of time and space didn't exist for a day.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

A monkey? Or a monk? I can't shake the image of a cloaked and balding seminarian climbing through the layers of the rack, fending off attacks by robots carrying inflatable rings.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Well... our crazy idea is in this thread.

But the "release the hamsters" reminded me of my favorite part of the manual (it's been in it for a few years)- go to Section 8, pg. 30. In the left-hand column, in the bottom bubble, it shows that gerbils may not be used as an energy source.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Since your robot may not be taller than 6 feet in the Opponent's Home Stretch, I considered a jumping robot. Or trained squirrels running the robot.

Edit: Yes, ydnar90, very true. I did come up with this before they changed the rules, but thank you for pointing this out. The robot would have jumped on springs... :)

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Blue Mist you need to check FIRST's updates. They got rid of the 6ft limit. You can go as high as you want at any point on the field. The only limit is the overpass and the height of where you are playing

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Haha, this is my first year on the team, so my friends and I came up with some incredibly implausible stuff:
-A flechette bot: One robot unfolds into twenty, which zoom around the course getting two points for every time they cross the finish line.
-A version of metal gear rex.
-A giant snail, where the balls would be pushed through a helical shell then flicked over the hurdle.
-Me in a box.
-A fire paradox which shoots out fire then puts it out with a water gun simultaneously. For absolutely no use besides the awesome factor.
-A robot with a harpoon gun to pull balls off the hurdle.
And of course, every robot has onboard speakers playing Metallica. As per design instructions.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

"The Iron Curtain" - A robot that pulls an entire sheet over your opponent's viewing area. The most un-GP robot you could ever build...it's not even really funny. hahaha

We are building the Mach 5 this year.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

I don't want to be mean to freshmen but....

Apparently, in the designs of freshmen, the laws of physics do not apply and neither do the relative forces of motors. Also, we are going to use pneumatics to repeatedly launch the balls over overpasses from ground level. :D

-vivek

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

The craziest is a penguin styled robot. Lol. I have no idea that would work.

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hahahahahahaa
(kinda an inside joke)

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Making a wooden trebuchet robot would be pretty cool...

After looking at the pink team's 'teaser', it may actually be a viable strategy.

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Borg Cube - assimilates other bots :)

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wrapping our littlest freshmen in tinfoil on 80-20 stilts. as long as theyre in the BOM, it doesn't say in the manual no people used as parts?

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

You may want to examine your materials in further depth. That design was a leading one on my team until we realized none of our little freshman can pick up the ball :rolleyes:. And neither can some mentors...

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

That would have worked well for last year... if you could get the robot to go high enough. Our team actually thought about doing that.

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I know for the 2006 contest the team decided to fire balls with a wooden wheel and timing belts as tank treads. The wheel didn't work and the robot moved slower than us. It was retooled at a second regional and played pure defense, as a 4 wheel drive robot. It was kinda funny to see it flapping its wings though, they were designed to shoo balls into the corner goals.

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A robot with an array of airzookas to knock the trackball off the overpass.

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Last year when discussing drivetrain ideas someone walked up to the whiteboard and drew a jet engine on wheels then said "let's put a freaking jet engine on the robot!"

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We've had:

A helicopter
a sportscar
a student in a silver spraypainted box

that's it so far this year =p

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Imagine the robot looks more or less like the mouth of a whale shark. It has little tiny auxiliary wheels to get to the overpass. Somehow, it needs to get a ball off the overpass. Then it mates with the ball and gyros kick in, and from that point on, it balances on top of the ball, using it as a sort of wheel.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Well, it's settled. Today we decided on our robot design.
The robot is named the Tacobot, the sole reason being that we made the same design during a VEX competition and took pictures with it holding tacos.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

1. For this year: The Hippity Hop bot (Google it)
2. Every year: Our teacher mentor is 5 ft. tall and 120 lbs. She's FIRST legal! She never gets tired of that joke.
3. We were having trouble with our poof bot so considered strapping our electronics on a box and parking it on the ramp for some end game points.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

For all your flying design inquiries, let's not forget to include lower flyby's under the Overpass just to get at least 2 points for crossing your finish lines by having your LAP INDICATOR set off the sensors... ;)

Flying completely over the Overpass (and your finish lines) may cost you the match in the end if you forget that simple way to score points. :p

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

One idea that my team thought of was to use some super-powered air-blower thing and blow under the ball. Then, hopefully, Bernoulli's principle would kick in and we'd be able to go around the field with the ball hovering a few feet above us, allowing us to go under the overpasses as the ball went over.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

climb onto the opponent over pass and fend off hurdles....

need I say more?

lol, vivek

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

we were thinking of taking our electrathon car and putting a small midget inside

and also a hovercraft

and the craziest one involved someones underwear and a can of spraypaint

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Ok, so me and another team member thought it'd be nice if we could put a ramp on the bot for some strange reason. He also goes, "Why not put a flame thrower on it?" I said sure, why not add a chainsaw to the back of it! He also puts a Tommy gun on the thing, but I said no, M16, then he says mini chaingun, I said .50 CAL!!!! "YEAHHH!!!!" Uhm, we also figured a giant battle axe would be fitting too. I think we were in BattleBots mode.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

One member (before reading the rules) wanted to attach a pinpoint to a stick... in endgame, you could just pop your balls ontop of the overpass; practically impossible to remove!
Now you're thinking with portals!

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Maybe if we build a giant wooden badger.

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I think the best robot is The Magic School Bus. Anyone know a mentor with the last name 'Frizzle'?

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so far this year, the weirdest design we have come up with was using play-doh to stick to the trackball in order to hold it. Our best, though was lastyear when we found in the rules that there was no verticla height limit to the bots, so we were going to attach a hook and winch to the rafters of the arena, and we were going to lift ALL THREE robots on our alliance!:yikes:

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

so far this year, the weirdest design we have come up with was using play-doh to stick to the trackball in order to hold it. Our best, though was last year when we found in the rules that there was no vertical height limit to the bots, so we were going to attach a hook and winch to the rafters of the arena, and we were going to lift ALL THREE robots on our alliance!:yikes:

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Some suggestions from students at Saturday's brainstorming meeting:

- a helicopter
- build the robot inside a deflated trackball: robot would contain pressurized air tanks that would inflate the ball from inside during hybrid mode, then roll itself like a hamster ball, hoping the refs would mistake it for a real trackball
- push the ball around the track with air pressure waves coming from a large subwoffer playing Metallica
- vertical air column floats the ball about 7' above ground as it drives around the track
- a giant Pac-man that would "swallow" the trackball
- a helicopter (the rookie student just didn't want to give up his idea, even as of yesterday!)
- putting our smallest student inside a trackball, then replacing the ball for one of the field when no one was looking

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

someone on our team thought of a robot that would tip over so it would 5 feet long and it would just be a catapult.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Okay for this year, the wackiest idea involves gigantic chopsticks and a rice bowl. The chopsticks are on the front of the bot and pick up the trackball; they then deliver the trackball to the rice bowl on top of the bot. The rice bowl then catapults the trackball.

And also, if we're on the red alliance, the red trackball would be like a giant boiled shrimp ball in the bowl.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

wow, some of these are just out there, but i guess thats the point of the thread.

one serious design brought up last year resembled some 2WD vehicle out of Star Wars. it had two, huge bicycle wheels with an arm in the middle. think about 2wd wedge-bots you would see in battlebots, except with bicycle wheels and an arm.

the worst design i've come up with, i literally dreamed up. last saturday night, i dreamed a basic box bot with a chair mounted on top. i believe it was a denso motor that we used to swivel the chair. a clown was then duck-taped to the top. after a funny scene in the dream where we had to get the robot to pass inspection, we drove the robot in a match. unfortunately, we were disabled for high speed ramming before the clown could score.

and no, i didn't bring this up in the meeting. probably should've. :rolleyes:

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

We sugested that equping our robot with a deflector dish may protect it from falling Track Balls, but we were doubtful of its ability to stand up to the force.
Maybe we can beam up the track ball over the overpass.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

One of our crazy designs while brainstorming was a large fan to blow the ball over the overpass. Then a large tube to catch the ball on the other side. I think our 120lb limit would have been met.:ahh:

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Last night we were throwing ideas around... (at 11:30 on a school night...) and someone mentioned a "jousting javelin"

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

well this isn't a robot design but we were joking about controlling the robot with a DDR pad or Guitar Hero Controller :D

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

We've talked about controling it with a power glove. I was thinking about how one would control a 4-jointed arm (like the one in the kickoff animation), and my favorite idea was to use a "voodoo doll" of the arm, with one of the drivers furiously minipulating it while trying to score handle game pieces.

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.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

At first, we wanted the robot this year to 'swallow' the ball so that it was inside of a cavity within the robot, and would just roll around on the floor surrounded by the robot so we could hold on to it guaranteed.

...then we tried to fit the 40" ball inside of the maximum robot size rectangle. :o

-q

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

This year we have a rookie freshman whop is constantly coming up with odd ideas. we have started to call him the storm, but he doesn't know this :p . one of his ideas was to put a jet engine on the robot for speed, then the end of arm device should be a vacuums. he is constantly just saying these random ideas, we are starting to get scared.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Mine wasn't funny until I drawed it out. Then it looked vulgar. >_<

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We were going to try a hovercraft, but it would be so easy to bump.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

For Triple Play we considered a speed bump robot that fell and consumed the entire side between 2 of the tetras, and had an "Arm of God" to reach the automated loading zone and stack the tetras on most of the field.

To Aim High, we thought about a pneumatic cannon like a student on our team builds for fun, sadly custom pneumatics weren't allowed.

Rack and Roll we wanted a plate of suction cups to stick to the alliance station wall then lift our bot and 2 other robots up off the ground scoring points for all three robots... rules again got in the way.

This year the worst thing we were thinking about was a robot that turned by banking using pneumatic pistons. There was also another to attach to the center of the field, and run through the divider really fast crossing both finish lines.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

we have always wanted a helicopter for years yet come up with the bumper and weight issue just as your team did...

our most rediculous idea this year was to have a bot with a very long pipe that harnessed the power of a black hole to suction the balls, as the vacuume cups simply wont do. then we realised that it might just suck the balls up, which we figured wouldnt be too bad, then the field gone, then the entire verizon center and then it would suck our own bot into itself. thats when we knew we had a problem... that and the fact that i dont think we could get that much tubing into envelope...

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

So you attach an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device to the front of your bot? FIRE RED PORTAL! FIRE BLUE PORTAL! RUN! I pray that someone doesn't get their bot stuck in an infinite loop.

On a serious note, I had an idea sort of like a speed ramp out of Sonic. Hold the ball with some freely rotating wheels, spin a conveyor below it really fast, then let go. Then I realized that gravity existed.

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Even if it were available off the shelf, it exceeds the cost limit for a single component. (What's the exchange rate on internal organs these days, anyway?)

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Pff, I'm sure SOME company has a COTS ASHPD. Either that or cake...:D

But wait... the cake is a lie!?

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

My favorite: my first year in FIRST (2001), we're sitting around discussing designs, and we had come up with several serious ideas. We get to the last guy in the room, and he says "I want a robot that can fly and make pizza". We quickly realized we had exhausted all possible ideas, and moved on. The "robot that flies and makes pizza" became one of our team jokes from then on.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

we wanted to build just a frame then have our smallest member get on it and do all the work wile the drivers drove the frame around

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Never ask for crazy, off-the-wall ideas...

The result was the idea of a robot that would do a chin-up on the overpass to send the ball over. Good idea, except that you can't grapple field elements...

Another was a large 3/4 circle with scoops at each end. The idea was to drive up under the overpass and drop the ball over into the other scoop. Just one minor problem...something about scale...

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

actually, that was done by one team 4 or 5 years ago. there was a giant screen that unfolded - the screen was painted black on one side and white on the other, making a one-way veil. can't remember which team right now though...

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

we thought seiously about creating a robot that goes this way:

in front he has platform that the trackball can be placed on. that platform can shoot the ball up and backwards towards an upright trampoline that shoots the ball back over the overpass =P

hell yeah

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Put an air cannon on side to blast ball out of opponents grip and put something on the back of robot to push the ball backwards after you crossed the lane line. Score once though the finish line, fire it backward across it again scoring more points, then have another robot push it back again across the line for even more points.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

giant desiel teflon ducktape cannon

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

toilet seat

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

We were talking about how get the ball over the overpass, and my response was "Why don't we just jump over it?"

Yeah...

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

More than one, but I know who you are referring to. That was a common tactic in 2003

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Our robot will use the VERY SAME tranporting (atomizer maybe....?) devise used in the Starship ENTERPRISE to make laps. Only problem we've had so far is getting the robot to stop turning into plasma...:(

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Hey, you got something against painting yourself silver? :P

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

Someone had a design of making a "poking stick" that consisted of 90 degree angles and just went around and "poked" at the ball. It actually wasn't even looked at.

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

our team has the running joke of "Toaster Bot" from last year (and this year). If the match was a water challenge, we would cannibalize ourselves to "toast" the opponents. scrapped due to the lack of gracious professionalism.

also, "Wesley Bot" (me in a cardboard box). What a riot :rolleyes:

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

A mentor and I were discussing the possibility of a robot that could create a worm hole that would transport the ball back in time and through space so we could score at the beginning of the match. It would also allow us to score many more times than the other teams. :P

Re: Silly and ridiculous robot designs.
 

do u know what the counter weight is on a french catapult is i rmr our physics saying its like a 40:1 ratio lol