Quote:
Originally Posted by Thuvishan.R
Very interesting shooter design, I hope to get a chance to see this robot in person. You have explained a bit about the strategic thought process but I'd like to hear more about the prototyping that went into coming up with this final product. Good luck to you guys throughout your competition season!
|
We actually had a spoof video we released earlier in the season showing our prototype robot perform (which forces us to title this thread 'REAL robot reveal' because most people seemed to believe it was our actual competition robot):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H49_6WVDT98
As you can see from the video, some of the elements in the competition robot we're developed and tested during prototyping, but a few we're designed only during CADing:
- Early on we decided we are not going to be using pneumatics this year since we couldn't find enough instances where we needed it to justify all the added weight, volume and possible complications.
- The intake mechanism was inspired by 971's 2013 intake
- Our indexer (The Spoon) was something we came up with after doing tons of playing around with geometry - which was our main focus throughout the CADing process. It took endless iterations before we came up with something that allowed us to be low enough while using top-bottom shooting wheels instead of left-right ones, and it seems to be working great
- We played a lot with geometry until we got to a good configuration for the shooting wheels two. Placing the wheels in such a way that they have a 45 degree angle between them in the bottom position allowed us to generate a shooting angle of slightly less than 45 degrees upwards which creates a trajectory that is pretty flat - that means we don't need to be too accurate when it comes to shooter speed in order to hit the target
- The drivetrain was somewhat of a shot in the dark for us since we never worked with either pneumatic wheels or a sheet metal chassis