Quote:
Originally Posted by Nemo
Edit: One other thing I was going to mention - Yeah, I do have a healthy amount of fear that spending too much time on a climber and then having to scrap it will result in a rough season. It's a risk vs reward thing that keeps me awake at night.
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I totally agree, except add to that the fear of watching your robot fall from L3 of the pyramid. That would be a game ender for most robots, and that is what has been keeping ME awake at night. I totally think that it's an achievable task, albeit extremely challenging. However, the GDC wouldn't ask the FIRST community to tackle a problem that they themselves Have not already tackled (to a certain extent), and did not think we could handle.
As to the fear of spending too much time working on a L3 system. Again, I totally agree that it is a HIGH risk and HIGH reward scenario. To devote a serious amount of time and effort working through the problem and fabricating prototypes, just to figure out that for whatever reason ( mechanism doesn't work, weight budget allotment, team change in strategy, system complexity and/or cost) would be a crushing blow to not only the individuals directly involved but to the teams ability to tackle the other facets of the game.
With that said, I know my team has been disproportionately allocating mentor/student resources towards frisbee shooting/collecting and general manipulation as opposed to the climb. It's a safer strategy, and if you run the numbers, an effective shooter can definitely negate a good climber. Now, me personally, believe that climbing is the more interesting challenge and as a result I'm the lone mentor on my team (crazy enough, I guess
) to attempt to tackle this problem; and even if I can do it, it will be a tough sell. Again, due to the risk.
I know other teams are dealing with the negative responses to the ideas of climbing, has anyone come up with a valid way to sell a potentially robot destroying strategy, or is the safety inherent in the design? In other words, the safety features of the design / mechanism sells the team on it's feasibility.? Just wondering if anyone else is getting resistance and how you are dealing with it.
Finally, my first climbing prototype, which is no longer the way I want to go about it, had quite the mechanical failure. I thought I would share this to illustrate just what kinds of forces you are dealing with when trying to use an arm to 'curl' the weight of the robot. The shaft was a .5" 4140 steel shaft, acting as the output of a 5-stage AndyMark GEM planetary gearbox giving us a reduction of 666:1. Perhaps I should of known it was destined for failure based off of the reduction. (note: it curled 178 pounds before failing
)
EDIT: And yes, this challenge has completely humbled me!