While our final design is still being worked out in the computers, we've assembled a simple gripper onto our 2004 Tetra bot, showing how truly simple a robot can be and still function in this game. If it hadn't been assembled two years ago, the robot you see in these pictures would be quite capable of competing (minus a few small technical updates in the rules and whatnot) and it would be able to score on all goals.
...Now if only our engineers and students in the back rooms could get that into their heads and design something this simple!
Essentially, it's a single pneumatically actuated solid boom on an A-Frame, with a three pronged pneumatic gripper made of aluminum tube from around the shop, and a little bit of surgical tubing (so that we don't poke any more holes in the tubes than we need to...). All the upper mechanisms are pneumatic and rather lightweight, and it only really has two moving parts for the whole gripper mechanism. Simple and effective.
