[shewejff]

Thanks for the comments. We really tried to go with a "simple yet effective" robot this year so that we could finish up early to be able to practice and work out many of the bugs before our first competition (this has been a problem for us the last couple years).

We can't take credit for the shooter pull-back mechanism. I've seen it on a few different robots. I think that we did a good job implementing it and getting it to fit in a pretty tight space under the shooter.

As for people defending us while we're shooting, we were worried about that too and tested it out. We tried to determine how close a robot would have to be to be able to defend us. Deceivingly, they would actually have to be pretty close for the ball to be able to hit them (about 2 feet away for a full 5 foot tall robot). If they are going to be that close to us while we're in the key, they risk us just driving forward (with our rear end still in the key) and touching them. We're also just thinking of pulling the surgical tubing a little tighter and shooting from further back in the key so that it's not even a possibility.