Quote:
Originally Posted by rvgrossman
For teams out there that have an identical second, or even third, robot. How do you build your second bot? Do you build both at the same time or do you do one and then the other? On top of that, any tips for a newer team trying to do it next season?
|
Team 1619 has come up with a way of building two robots that is slightly less resource/time intensive as building two identical robots. We build two identical drivetrains, and then only one of our primary manipulator which we then use as our witholding allowance.
Since our changes between events have never involved changes to the drivetrain, we are able to ensure that the manipulator that worked in practice is the same one we use on the field.
In 2014 our catapult and collector were mounted together onto two plates that attached to the robot using 8 bolts. To remove the whole assembly we would unplug two pneumatic tubes and two electrical connections (for a laser sensor and a motor) before just unbolting the 8 bolts and lifting it off to take with us to competition. Re-installation was similarly a breeze.
In 2015 it was a bit more complicated, simply due to the mechanisms and how we wired it to best conceal the cables. We had a giant claw, used to pick up containers, that we would remove to swap between the practice chassis and the competition robot. We also had a conveyor belt that sat in the middle of the robot that we had to replace at our first competition for weight savings. The biggest hassle there was the electrical connections. We could take the entire "power tower" (the claw on it's long rail that allowed it to travel up and down) off the robot with 3 bolts, but wiring/unwiring the 2-3 motors (depending on which regional it was for), the encoder, and the limit switches took a while since the whole bundle was neatly enclosed in snakeskin and ziptied down. It was still a much better solution than if we had created two full robots however.
If you create two of your drivetrains and your manipulator design is such that it weighs less than the witholding allowance, it cuts down on the majority of the different revisions of machining you would need to do if you had two identical robots the whole season. You only need to keep making stuff to account for the changing design of one manipulator, not two, and the drivetrain usually doesn't change much from competition to competition.