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Re: Most matches for a robot?
I believe I have told this one before on CD (and I have bored many in person), but I think it is a good story relative to this thread.
In 2007, for 33, we designed super light due to all the structure. Estimated the cycle count for the arm as about 10 cycles per match time 20 matches per event times 5 events (3 regionals, Worlds, and IRI) or about 1,000 cycles. For aluminum, this is designing just a bit past yield, but not too terrible much. Operation wise, this would be 2 minutes x 100 matches or about 3-4 hours of match play (180-240 minutes). We built a practice bot with similar structure. This bot self-destructed after about 10 hours of practice. It was structural fatigue of some of the main arm elements. Absolutely catastrophic.
Because of this, we made some fix-it parts during one of the fix it windows in case such a failure occurred at Worlds.
End of the day, the robot made it all the way through regular season*, IRI, Kettering Kick-off and then was on display at the YES expo doing match after match until it too self destructed.
When we tallied it up, (TBA shows 68 matches), but the robot likely saw close to those 100 matches, or about 3.5 hours of match play. Plus a few hours of practice/test/tune cycling plus about 1/2 day of playing with at YES expo (probably another 3 hours of operation/cycling). IE it also failed at about 10 hours of operation.
Once switching to districts, the match count just about doubles, and the potential for practice hours can be quite high with unbag time. Basically, you can't play with the fatigue limits nearly as much as you "yusta-could".
*We did fatigue one piece a couple times during season where the claw connected with the wrist. the issue with that piece was it had a lot of welding which lost the temper of the Aluminum, and it would yield when the arm would occasionally whack itself on the ground. We had a failure right before alliance selection at Detroit that year, and it had to be replaced.
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