Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Doing our part to help this minibot arms race get way out of hand. 1.23s overall, 0.87s on the pole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-aryXw-XhA

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

I believe that this is the fastest minibot I have seen so far!
Amazing job and good luck in St. Louis!

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Looks great! Excited to get to see you guys in action this weekend!

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Awesome minibot and deployment! I wish we could race ours next to yours! We have very similar designs. Who knows, maybe we'll get too on Einstein?!

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

wow, i thought the one you had at Denver was fast. that thing is amazing.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

And contribute, you have. The level of competition of minibots at the CMP is going to be fantastic. I foresee plenty of matches finishing before 0:00 on divisional semis/finals and on Einstein.

I certainly hope the field electronics are working at peak performance this week. :eek:

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

That's amazing. I look forward to pit-neighboring with you guys and hopefully getting the opportunity to play with you! I thought our minibot was fast, yeesh. With that ramp, you guys are at max speed before you even hit the pole...

See you soon!

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

what diameter are you running

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Looks beautiful. I'm glad to see all these super fast minibots coming into champs. We were inspired as well and will be rocking one too. I'm curious your radius as well? We're running 6" and a tiny minibot

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Thanks everyone for the comments. The team was a bit nervous about trading out our old consistent sub-2 second with deployment minibot, but felt like this was an arms race we didn't want to be left out of.

I think we might all be curious about what each one found the optimum radius to be. For that to mean anything we would also have to share the weight of the minibot and how we minimized friction between the wheel shafts and the legal bearings. The strength of magnet and gap between it and the pole also played a role in optimizing the design. I think it is more fun for each team to come to their own conclusion on these numbers through experimental iterations. As you can imagine the wheel diameter is slightly bigger with this design than it was with our old one. Not as much as I first anticipated though.

(We also found that some tetrix motors are just plain faster than others. Our identical backup minibot seems to go slightly faster than our first. Hence, we are promoting it to 1st string.)

The beauty of the new deployment system is that it uses the exact some release commands as the old one. 1 pneumatic cylinder to release the allignment device, and a second to release the minibot. We literally just have to bolt on the new system and hook up the exact same pressure lines. No change to the driver interface and no change to the code. We wanted to do this for Denver but we didn't have any with-holding allowance left.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

That's cool. Unfortunately we burned up a motor today, and our other pair has been through 2 regionals already. I just hope we get lucky with the set of motors we just ordered.

We actually even tried a .75in diameter wheel with mixed results.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Wow 0.75in seems large indeed. I suppose our desire for speed was tempered slightly by our need for consistancy.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

In our experiments, we determined that the effects of roller diameter top speed versus acceleration nearly "cancel out" for many different roller diameters. I can't wait until the Championships are over so I can start a thread about minibots where we can all FINALLY talk about all of the different design options and what "tweaks" worked best.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

i cant exactly tell but it looks to me like you use springs to accelerate the minbot off of the launcher i know its in the horizontal but that has to translate in to movement up the poll that does not come from the battery

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

I think it would be hard to keep a spring loaded deployment legal when integrated with a ramp. ::rtm:: I can't wait to see if someone finds a legal way to integrate the concept at champs. :cool:

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

The spring force is converted to kinetic energy in the wheels, motors and entire minibot by the time Deployment starts (minibot is over the platform) so I think it is as legal as ramp deployments in general. Of course, I don't interpret the kinetic energy ramp deployments have before Deployment starts as incidental (like G19's blue box says) so interpret all of them as illegal. I interpret incidental kinetic energy as the wheels & motors free spinning, not kinetic energy of the entire minibot (most importantly the battery) moving.

Of course, my interpretation doesn't matter. The GDC does not perform design reviews, so it is de facto legal unless a head ref says it is illegal (then tower is disabled). As a spectator of events (live or webcast), I want ramps to be legal since they are a really cool, creative idea by teams like 56, 190, 233, 368, etc... and implemented/optimized by many great teams. Titanium's is the first swinging arm ramp (most are flop down or extend) I've seen, great job. Pink did the correct thing by asking the Q&A (right when regionals started) in a grey area . GDC probably should have provided some interpretation, even changing the blue box under G19 if necessary. The Q&A shouldn't review every design, just a few unique ones with grey areas in the rules like the ramps this year, 469's last year (pretty clearly legal), 190's 2008 bot (they still have a sense of humor about it), etc... so it is not left up to the head ref at their first event. Maybe they should just review all 190's bot's before ship since they always strive to create a unique, outside the box concept, robot ;)

OK, enough of that rant, it has been building for over a month. Since the spring thing was brought up I couldn't resist (I've had conversations like this before and mentioned it on webcast chat rooms but I have never seen a similar opinion expressed on CD). I don't want to hijack the thread. To debate legality of ramps back and forth is unproductive. I have my interpretation, everyone can have their own interpretation, no one is right or wrong because it is not clear. Since there haven't been any tower disablements (probably would have heard about it here) it is de facto legal. Since I will be watching Curie this week, I hope to see a quad ramp match with 1986, 368, 1678 and some other ramp bot (that we probably haven't seen yet) beacuse that would be awesome :cool: Curie might just be the "Minibot Division" between these all ramps and 2081's timing challenge (without ramps) in the pit.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

I think the swinging arm would have worked, but we wanted to put positive pressure on the pole. To accomplish this we have joined the flop down crowd. Same pneumatic commands, but different pivot orientation.

Watching 368 in the Hawaii finals is what convinced us that the ramp was the only way to go. They had our full attention having a regional in such a unique time zone. We are looking forward to sharing an alliance with them at some point this weekend as well.

PS. I am hoping that the GDC reduces the 30lb with holding allowance for the next season. The ability to redesign and bring in 1/4th of the robot makes it too easy to reverse engineer other designs. 12 lbs (10%) is plenty, especially if the bumpers are not included.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Only if they exclude identical Spare Parts from the weight limit. The majority of ours is spares. Who cares how many spares you bring to the event?

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

We found this to be the case also, however I'm not sure the same holds true for rampbots. Having initial verticle velocity changes the whole equation in favor of larger diameters.

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

No spring or other assist, but I'm glad it appears that way!

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

Looks great! Nice work guys. Good luck to you and your team at Championship! :)

Cass

Re: Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed
 

How awesome would that be? Looking forward to seeing everyone this evening and the rest of the weekend!