Got a shoutout from 3173, had to respond! I designed our floor collector this year, and it seems to be the system that people remember when they see our robot. There are features that I would never replicate on that collector if I could do it over . . . there are also great features, and I've tried to detail them below.
Mooretep had an awesome video (0:30 has a really nice shot):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqfuRlymtSQ
Official Reveal (showcases initial testing):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmdET56tukM
Official Recap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w79l4VhjrD0
Ironically, the floor collector wasn't really our top priority (we didn't have priorities due to the fact that we tried to do everything; don't do that!), so features such as being able to funnel really well and take two discs at the same time didn't make it into the final design. If we had properly valued the collector, we would have thought differently and implemented those features.
Cool Attributes:
At the mouth of the collector, there are actually two rollers, one on the bottom and one on the top. We arrived at the same conclusion as 33, that the bottom roller for kicking the disc up was crucial. The coolest part was really that we did not drive it using anything nearly as complicated as a gearbox; it was just a twisted belt run from the top roller. I can get a picture later, but it was something like this:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ht=2826+teaser
That bottom roller kicked the disc into contact with the upper roller, and that powered the frisbee through the rest of the system (geared at 18 ft/sec roller surface speed) and out into our storage subsystem.
To prevent our collector from getting caught on the carpet and irregular surfaces we installed wheels for the collector to ride on. This was another pretty cool feature, we machined two delrin rounds with holes for bearings, turned down the ends of two 3/8" bolts to 1/4" diameter and the bearings rode on that makeshift shaft.
What I would have liked to do:
Here's a really easy way to make your collector take two frisbees side by side. Make your collector funnel to the side, kind of like 233's or 973's collectors. One straight edge, one slanted edge. Our prototypes indicated that this worked really really well, and we only didn't implement it because our robot design forced that compromise.
Alternatively, do something like 971's collector (I would note that both their 2012 and 2013 robots are absolutely phenomenal in handling game pieces throughout their system) . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bsWRIMV9CY It would be really cool if they posted on this thread
Hope this helps! Collectors this year were really challenging, and it's really interesting to see how other teams approached that problem. Keep the responses going, I'm having a blast reading this thread
