By most impressive do you mean most innovative, most simple for accomplishing its task, or best operated? Each of these things can be factors in deciding whether or not a mechanism is good, with the exception of most innovative. Although, from experience, I can say that building something that’s really cool for the heck of it can be a lot of fun.
2000:
47 - their clam shell could score a ton of balls and steal a ton of balls from their opponents.
111 – their ball conveyor mechanism has been copied by countless teams, including themselves in 2002
2001:
60 / 254 – simple gripper mechanism that used a single actuator and minimal pieces to grab the 30” balls
234 – their arm that was controlled by the student driver’s arm movements
2002:
60 – grabbed 2 goals, lifted them off the ground, and swung them at 30RPM… scary stuff
95 – 18 balls in less than 5 seconds… dang…
111 – improved and adapted ball mechanism from 2000, as well as 2 goal grabbers and a swerve
I disliked the 2003 game. No matter how well you could stack, you could still have your stack knocked over or otherwise be beaten. It didn’t matter how well you could manipulate boxes. Telescoping or other kinds of autonomous flailers didn’t matter, either, because a scoring zone could be cleared by one robot in a minute or so (given half decent drivers). I thought this was a bad year for manipulators, since the majority of teams realized they should clear their opponents’ scoring zone, then rush to the plateau. In the end, there were some cool things made for dealing with the bins, but I wouldn’t look back at that game in particular when looking for a mechanism to adapt or improve upon.
2004: I didn’t catch much of 2004. I was only able to attend Sacramento and SVR.
33 – great ball collecting robot
45 – good herding robot, and great capping robot
60/254 – probably the best all around robot for the game. It did everything: knocked down the 10 point ball in autonomous, dragged a goal, had wings with passive rollers on them for increased herding area and they wouldn’t get hung up on a ball, 3-pronged gripper for easier ball pickup without needing much alignment and good capping, and they could hang from the floor
2005:
22/56/67/233/245/254/330/etc – kept it simple and basically just lanced a tetra and then deposited it, and did it effectively
217/229/968 – kept it almost as simple but added an actuator to better secure the tetra
16 – the pig tail was cool
85 – if the pig tail was cool, then the corkscrews were crazy cool
469 – the scare factor alone from seeing three of their tetras on top of your cap on the center goal is enough for me to add them
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Originally Posted by Veselin Kolev
And in practice rounds on thier practice field, with just one robot they could stack 9 every round, going to the auto loading station and to the goal. Overall they had a very fast drive train and arm system.
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I got to coach two of our practice matches at SVR, and in both matches we scored 8 and 9 tetras. The most impressive part about this, imho, is that our drivers were able to score these tetras on goals all over the field. There was one practice match where we blacked out the whole field by ourselves. When we were trying to cap massive quantity in one match at The Championship we were able to cap 12 on 3 goals plus capping in autonomous.