View Single Post
  #9   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 09-01-2006, 12:09
FIRSTgurl93 FIRSTgurl93 is offline
Registered User
AKA: Stephanie Bekkers
FRC #0857 (Superior Roboworks)
Team Role: College Student
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: Appleton, WI
Posts: 5
FIRSTgurl93 is an unknown quantity at this point
Send a message via AIM to FIRSTgurl93
Re: Best way to collect balls off the field?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Rotolo
This thread is started to discuss ideas for getting balls off the floor and into the robot.

Last year at Nationals, the Vex folks had these cool rubber flappy wheels, and they would just pull those small balls right up into the robot. Anyone working on a larger version of that? Maybe brushes like a street sweeper, or arms that come out and sweep side to side (kinda like those nasty gathering 'bots that picked up older robots for the scrap heap, in the animated movie Robots)? After all, we have 60 x 60 to play with once the game's on...

Don
Two years ago when we had to collect and score those kickballs?...well our team made a roller system to feed the balls into a hopper that was lined with mesh material as to let it expand as it filled up. We ended up doing very well and it was very efficient because we could suck up anything in our path and it rarely ever got jammed. They called us the "Laundry basket" robot, but our rollers were covered with a rubber material to grip the balls and the rollers went in a curved path to lead the balls into the hopper and the rollers also spun the other direction as to let the balls go back out the same way to score in the side goals.

Stephanie