Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard
I love seeing teams like yours see success and just keep looking higher. The re-design looks smart, and similar to what 5254 did between Champs and IRI.
First of all, I'm not familar with your machine, so how do you plan to play with this robot? Are you a landfill robot or a feeder robot (or both)?
It's always good to look at teams that are better than you and see what they're doing and learn from it, but you also have to know why they did things the way they did.
What is the exact purpose of each improvement?
It's very easy to say "Well 1114 did it so it must be smart"- except that they had a very specific set of design criteria that you may not have.
Lastly, where are the bottlenecks in your gameplay, and how are you addressing these? For most feeder robots this year, they had something on their robot that was slower than the chute door, so that was their bottleneck, so improving things like elevator speed and using a long ramp didn't help them at all. Similarly, if you're a landfill robot, there's no reason to gear your elevator faster than you can possibly collect a tote. Understanding what the slowest part of your gameplay is this year and figuring out how to improve that is what continuous improvement is all about in 2015.
Good luck with your re-design and your off-season events!
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This year we focused on the human feeder station (you can see one of our full cycles at 0:52
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUsPfgUsUAM), however, with these changes we made, we would like to primarily become a landfill robot while still having the capability of doing human feeder.
The changes we made were all designed ourselves, but inspired by other teams. The intakes for example, we had problems with the totes sliding out when we backed up with a tote, and we wouldn't grab it all the way and it would fall out the front, so we added the second wheel from what we saw on the Killer Bees robot to keep contact with the tote at all times so it doesn't slide out when the robot is moving. Also, we didn't have a way of getting knocked over trash cans with this new bin stabilizer, so we added the pivot on it based on The Cheesy Poofs.
Our main bottleneck this year at the feeder station was lining up to the chute and correcting totes that would fall in sideways, so the hope for this design is to add a third set of wheels above the front wheels to drive the tote in (similar to The Citrus Circuits). Our biggest problem in the landfill was that we had no stabilization of the RC and it would just fall off if we weren't careful, which is the point of the stabilizer.