[Solace]

Originally posted by jon
I first wrote a rant about how teams need to be more creative in their robot designs.. but yeah, it seemed pointless, and I already knew the answer to all my questions.

Pretty much, the reason I started this thread, was for one question.

Has there ever been a walking robot in a FIRST competition?

ok... two questions...

What's been the most creative/non-standard locomotion for a FIRST robot?

ok... three...

Why don't we see more of them?

the only really imaginative ones that I can recall are 857's kiwi drive from last year, Beatty's from last year, and this year's technocat ball drive.

I think the reason why we don't see more things like this are 1)Simplicty - noncomplicated things tend not to break as easily, 2)money - not all teams are that well endowed to do things like that, and 3)time and effort - have you any idea whatsoever how difficult it would be to design a walking robot? Even if you did go ahead and build one, it would probably take a couple of years of build sessions just to get the design down and prototyped before you even started building it.