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Originally Posted by pwilczynski
While your concept is worrect, I find it hard to believe that bumpers slow a robot down at all at impact. Unlike braking a car, bumpers are like putting a big, well...bumper, in front of the car. The bumpers are really to protect the frame of the robot from damage, not to make less force.
In fact, bumpers will actually increase force, as they add more mass (15 pounds) to the robot. Comparing a 120 lb robot to a 135 lb robot, the 135 lb robot has 12.5% more mass, and thus 12.5% more force. Even if bumpers did make accelleration slower, the added inertia of the 135 lb robot would cancel this out.
I encourage every robot to put bumpers on if they can, because without them, more penalties will be called on you, and your robot will get more damaged.
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The big fault i'm seeing with this argument that more weight equals more force is that everyone's talking about ramming other robots, which is where this would apply.
For various reason's, my teams robot was (one regional, and that's all
) a rather good pusher. We did not however go racing across the field to ram the opponent. We generally had to maneuver to push the side of the opponents too. Our toughest opponents, if pushed from behind, would end up on the ramp and still able to shoot. Not to mention we did spend most of our time in the "personal" space of our opponents (so less distance ramming).
When going to the side to push, your weight affects the force of collision much less because of less speed. What matters is your pushing power, torque. The weight will and does increase torque.
Our robot had bumpers on 3 sides (ball collector, rarely used, on the front). My innate logic thinking says that this made us a more effective pusher when it came to getting that initial push from the side. We never sustained any damage (well a few dents in the shooter which was flush with the front of our robot) or penalties.
None the less, we couldn't push everyone (especially treads, which rather dominated the finals...). And I'm not doing so well in AP Physics this semester, so I could very well be wrong with some of the physics
