The 2002 Walled Lake Monster is finally finished. The attached picture generally sums up our robot. I uploaded more pictures to the gallery so you can see them as soon as they are accepted. Also, more pictures will be on our website tomorrow (
www.monsters308.com).
As you can see, the general strategy is to get two goals and lift them for traction. We can actually hold all three goals at one time, but we only lift two (the third is not necessary).
Our goal grabbers are nearly automatic. We can be off by nearly 10 inches to either side of the center line between the two goals and still have good automatic engagement.
We have another nice feature when we grab the goals. If you look at the picture, the goals are farther apart than 32 inches. When we get the goals, the natural motion of the robot and goals forces each goal outward away from the robot by about 5 inches on each side. Therefore, if you don't beat us to the goals, the 32 inch gap between the goals will be about 27 inches by the time you get there. We can actually make the gap smaller than that when we drive it a certain way. We felt it would be hard to squeeze a robot into gap smaller than 28 inches
.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pictures. Hope to see everyone at one of the competitions.
-Chris