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Unread 12-02-2015, 01:36
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Ken Lam
FRC #4719
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Rookie Year: 2014
Location: Calgary
Posts: 69
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Re: Unique robot design?

Quote:
Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird View Post
So the concept behind the snow plow is based more or less on playing pool. When you start up a game you break apart the triangle of balls and then pick off easy shots. If you look at our robots design you will see that it can handle multiple totes at once, but the time it takes to get to these totes and be ready to pickup isn't instantaneous, we have a lift we need to adjust (we got rid of a lot of alignment time with el toro but its still there). When we crack open the field or goal is to space totes out so we have quick pickup lines and no idle time where the gap between two totes is large enough that our mechanisms are ready to pickup a tote by the time we get to our next tote. The other advantage of this as in pool is when you break it open you have the chance of moving totes closer to where you need them. With vision drivers should be able to quickly identify pickup lines by tote orientation and looking for basic patterns one of the key ones I imagine is a path of totes roughly in the same orientation that starts close to the scoring platform dives a bit into landfill then comes back out. What I do not want to happen is that drivers get stuck in the habit of going for the closest tote to them when picking lines and spending time on a stubborn tote. I can see that happening a lot to teams that are keeping the starting pattern they only pickup totes in a certain order when in reality that order might not be the best. Breaking apart the totes should make those decisions on which tote to go to next much more clear.

Edit: Anybody got a better term then pickup lines in retrospect there has to be one...
Our team call robot like yours "cue ball" robot. We coined that term during our brainstorming on the day of kickoff.
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