Now that I have everyone’s attention
, I'll talk about the potential application. I was curious to see if some kind of "super goalie" would be plausible with this setup. Let me explain:
According to the rules, a robot is only allowed to have one 6" diameter vertical extension. However, there is nothing to say that there can't be more than one possible extension (this is even shown in the description of the rule in one of the pictures). It would be interesting to see a robot that plays the goalie position with 2 pistons (or equivalent devices) that rapidly extend and retract out of phase with each other such that only 1 is above 60" at any given time. If they alternate quickly enough, this goalie has the potential to block an effective area with a width much larger than 6". I am still hoping that someone will do this.
Another similar idea would be for the extension to be moving relative to the robot. A non-articulating 2' vertical metal bar that spins quickly in a 16" radius circle about the center of the robot would be effectively blocking a 32" wide area of the HIGH GOAL. I would also love to see a team do that for this year. The trade-off with this design though is that it confines said robot to their own GOALIE ZONE for the entire match. A piston instead of a metal rod could potentially solve this problem. However, running wires and/or pneumatic tubing to something spinning at this speed is nontrivial.
Hence the above question. I was wondering if a piston attached like this could be triggered just due to the difference in air pressure that results from the spinning. The bottom of the piston would be connected to storage tanks that are spinning near the center of rotation. The top of the piston would be open to the surrounding air. In this way, the spinning motion would automatically trigger the extension of the piston. When the motor slows down/stops, the piston would retract.
The cylinder in the above problem was just there to simplify it. At any point of distance d from the center of rotation, the pressure should be the same as that of any other point of distance d from the center of rotation. Thus, this scenario can be modeled by using an R of the closest point in the pneumatic system to the point of rotation, and an x of the distance from R to the furthest point in the pneumatic system.
I was fairly confident that this would not work without a massive volume of stored air, but I wanted to quantify just how much. There are probably other ways to accomplish this same objective, but this one has the potential be more elegant than the others since only a single controlled motor is required after the rest of the system is set up. The rule that will probably get in the way regardless is R78. If this system is considered a pneumatic system, then this whole setup would be invalid.
My team will not be prototyping this anytime soon, so if anyone out there is interested in prototyping this, please post video here. I would love to see this kind of system see at least a bit of action.