Team 1391: The Metal Moose (video)
 

We don't usually post teasers, robot video, etc... on chiefdelphi for general consumption. For some reason, we decided this year would be different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o10Kpgq4U

We're the one removing the trackball in the auto-modes.

That is our Trackball-launching bot for the 2008 competition. It saw competition at VCU, where we experienced some minor issues that prevented us from making an ideal showing (all of which have now been fully fixed).

Stats:
-10-12ft/sec
-Mecanum Drive
-Launches Trackballs ~14+ft vertically and ~10-12ft horizontally using high-strength surgical tubing and a linear motion system
-Gyroscope-assisted drive allows navigation by absolute field coordinate, not robot orientation
-Hybrid mode consistently removes trackball and crosses at least one line. Optimization being implemented at our second regional should guarantee 2-3 lines.

Pictures will follow, if there is interest.

Questions and comments appreciated!

Re: Team 1391: The Metal Moose (video)
 

Impressive! See your team at Philly.

Re: Team 1391: The Metal Moose (video)
 

Thanks for posting. Last night, I was on TBA watching your 2 matches and all I got was one misfire :( . Good to see what it can do and what shape it should be in for Philly. Never too early to start scouting ;)

Re: Team 1391: The Metal Moose (video)
 

Yea... Sorry about that! We were running a single length of 1/16th steel cable from the carrier plate to each fork as a mechanical stop. The force of the ball pushing on the outer points of the forks as we accelerated it up our launching plane exceeded the breaking point of both cables and caused the misfires you saw. Minor adjustments to where the ball sits on the forks were made necessary by the inclusion of a safety shield we put in place on Thursday at VCU, and that shifted the contact points of the ball enough to produce the behavior seen (we did NOT get cable breakage in tests).

We are now running triple lengths of 1/16th cable and have plans to move to double lengths of 1/8th steel cable first thing on Thursday morning at Drexel.


More fun facts about the Metal Moose:
- We can easily perform cross-field hurdles and hurdle over trackballs still on the overpass
- Balls launched from our system can still clear the overpass after their first bounce