Quote:
Originally Posted by Erik Huang
I brought that idea up at kickoff, but people were especially skeptical that such a thing might be possible. The amount of coordination between teams would be insane, especially if there isn't another robotics team near you.
If we could devise a standardized way to get two robots to climb together, that would be cool... but would it be a waste of time?
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So this coordination...how much would a team REALLY need beforehand? A team could design a robot that is nothing more than a rectangle with an unbelievably strong climbing mechanism to push robots up as needed. That's a reasonable plan, in my view.
What about this for a vaguely universal coordination system:
Those are push pull scrapers. Basically one pulls up behind the other, lowers a big hoop onto a hook on the back of the other, and the amount of power available for pulling dirt up off the ground is instantly greater. So for FIRST teams, they could (very easily it seems) put a hook on the back and a window motor actuated hoop on the front and boom-universal system is ready to go. At least one team doing this has to be the first one on the pyramid, however, and they are going to need a climbing mechanism, so at least in theory a team could have only the hook on the back of their robot and others could hook on. Point is, this is well within the reach of most teams and the strains on a push pull scraper are many many times greater than what we would have with our FIRST robots, so making it smaller seems like it could work.
Now...does it make sense for teams to do this? I have no idea. I do think it's a reasonable thing for teams to put together and providing it does not violate any rules (none are coming to mind), it seems solid as long as a few teams close to one another do it.