All right, so I had this great idea about a robot design, it's easy to build, and doesn't require much more additional stuff on teams' robot, and I thought it was the greatest idea I've ever thought of. And I tell my teams about it, and no one really took me seriously. So I thought maybe I will throw this out and see if anyone got lucky and actually paid attention to this.
Basically I assume robots already have an extension on them, to score the home zone 10 points. It isn't anything fancy. Just some sort of solid light structure that extend 15~20 feet with a really weak motor. And that extension probably want to point forward or backward, so you can score whichever home zone you like. And you probably want to point it at different direction just to be sure you can score that 10 points. See, nothing too complicated. It don't have to be a strong structure or anything. Just something that point and pull. Using one motor to deploy it, and another to point it. You will have one or two of these, depends if you want to score both home zone or not.
So, base on that, my idea is to replace the weak motor with a fisher price motor or similar ones, use steel cable to extend/retract the extension, and add a hook at the end (the ones you will be using to grab goals). So, once the match start, you point that extension forward toward the goals, extend it, and the hook grab onto the goals with 15 feet reach. BAM! You get to the goal(s) faster than anyone else. And you retract the extension with the steel cable to make sure you can pull the goals back.
The extension don't have to be anything strong, just need to be able to get the hook onto the goal, and let the fisher price do the job. The advantage is that you get the goals faster than just a drive train, and depends if you did it right, you might be the fastest robot getting to the goals. And it will not little addition to your robot, and some thinging about how to use the retracting motion to unhook the goals as then get near your robot.
But yeah, here is my idea of the month.
I was so proud of myself when I thought of this.