Quote:
Originally Posted by Bryce2471
If you don't mine me asking, how did you come to the conclusion that this would be the best intake to test, when you hadn't even made any previous prototypes? What was the thought process that lead to this unconventional intake geometry being your first attempt? Did you lay out the performance goals for the intake before hand? If so, what were they?
I am sorry if these questions come off to pushy. I'm just really interested in how you came to such an effective prototype so early.
Thanks again for all the information and resources that have been posted already.
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The thing was, this intake wasn't unconventional to a lot of us. We were expecting a lot more teams with this exact same style of intake in the season. I was surprised to see a lot less teams(or none) come up with this design (until later in the season).
The goals for the intake were:
- Fast at puling in a tote
- reorientate almost any tote, no matter what position it is in (besides up side down totes)
- Hold the tote inside our robot long enough for the indexer to pick up the tote
- Intake Cans, and upright cans
To accomplish these goals we thought that the intakes must somehow be able to pull the totes in towards us to orientate them, the wheels alone will probably not do this (We proved this later by removing the front wheels on this prototype). To pull the tote in you would need to have some sort of elastic pulling force to rotate it. THis is why we thought of the pivoting wheels on the outside. Also to make the totes go into the same position inside of our robot every time we would need to have another set of wheels that are "Fixed" (they actually can move a bit). So after coming up with the idea on the weekend, the students ran with it on Monday and came up with the prototype you can see above.
It worked pretty well at first, but we kept playing with spacing, wheels, elastic force and many other variables that we would think could affect them. After finding out the optimal things we began to CAD them, and they are now what you can see on the robot.
A few days later after the prototype we noticed that it might be possible to upright the Cans with out intake too. To accomplish this we tried adding something to make the can pivot around. Originally this was a just a 2x4 piece of wood someone would step on. We played around to find out if this was possible, and what the approximate distance from the inner wheels, this pivot would need to be. After building the robot the "Boot" as we called it, did not exactly perform as we hoped. During week one of competition (we were not competing) one of the members sketched up a rounded "boot" that would make a better pivot point, and guide the can upright. There is a picture of this in the Engineering Notebook on our website. Also to do this our intake would have to be spaced an extra 2 inches apart, which is why they have Cylinders on them to rotate inward and outward. These cylinders is why the inner "Fixed" wheels are not exactly fixed, they can be pushed outward a bit, but will move the tote back into the center of our robot when we intake it
Also you NEVER need to apologize for asking questions. Asking questions is how you learn. I would not be working on robots for a job, working on completing my Mechanical Engineering Degree and Diploma, and be a mentor on Simbotics if I never asked questions. At one point I was an eager and excited high school student who wondered all of these things too.
Ask questions, ask a lot of questions.
I hope all of this helps, and I wish you and your team a good luck in this upcoming season