[Peter Matteson]

This idea of innovation came up at work today discussing creative solutions to problems. This reminded me of something my team developed out of necessity and why Smokey Yunick is my hero. Since most people here on CD never knew about this I thought I'd bring up an innovation we developed a few years back.

Way back in 2004 we used vacuum actuation by creating a vacuum pump from a pnuematic cylinder with some check valves and globe motor with a crank on it. The vacuum was used to actuate the systems that would otherwise be pnuematic because we needed the vacuum for our design. Having one system that did both cut significant weight from our design. Also vacuum was explicitly allowed for the first time that year and there are not any rules written governing vacuum the way pnuematics are.

Using vacuum also allowed us to use the frame of the robot as an accumulator.

This has been legal every year since, but we haven't used it because our designs haven't needed vacuum.