[PAR_WIG1350]

I'm not involved much this year since I'm busy being a college student at college. If I were playing I might stick with a short turreted arm mounted on the corner of the chassis to score on the bottom row and corner goals. It would be servo actuated and capable of detecting weighted rings. The rest of the robot would be dedicated to a lifter. The Main focus of the robot would be the arm, the lifter is there simply because the arm wouldn't take up that much space and extra points are extra points and shouldn't be ignored. The type of arm I would use would be a three d.o.f. arm with a shoulder and an elbow mounted on a turntable. I don't know what kind of grabber I would use, but it would ideally be able to pick up and drop rings easily so that it could locate and score weighted rings. Structurally I would likely use mostly Tetrix tubes for the arm with angle brackets and servo mounts connecting the sections. Positioning would be purely pre-set positions to reduce driver work load. Visible signals would alert the driver of possessed weighted tubes so he could move closer to the corner goal to score them. The lift would be as simple as possible, likely a ramp leading to a scissor-lift platform that gives an extra few inches to the lift.

To get the ring onto the scoring peg, I might use a pair of limit switches attached to v-shaped levers to auto-align, or I might use a secondary claw, a passive v-shaped guide, or a flexible funnel that would be placed over the peg and the ring would be slid over the wide end compressing it around the peg creating a smooth transition from bot to peg (but no so much as to grasp, grab, or grapple the peg.