I'm a little bit torn, because our 2007 bot definitely wasn't the hardest of our robots to build (it was probably the easiest in my tenure aside of 2006), but that simplicity made it by far the most effective.
In our 12 year history, this bot became only our third alliance captain, and fourth alliance era elimination competitor. It also became our first bot to be selected in the first round (twice, although we declined at VCU), and our first to make the elimination at Championship during the alliance era. Our 2006 autonomous may have been more reliable, but this was certainly a much harder challenge than a corner dump, and certainly a
lot more fun to watch, and we still managed to score six keepers. Our team has had a history of being in high scoring matches in recent years (sometimes on the wrong side), and ED v. 8.0 kept that tradition, putting up the high scores at both VCU (108) and Galileo (271). It was one of the few times we've been a real target of defense (our previous best bot was in 2001, where there was no defense), and aside of a couple excellent defenders (122 and 703 namely) we managed to cope very well. I still remember a match at championship where we got a tube stuck on our flag and our chain came off (and wedged itself between our sprocket and frame, totally immobilizing that half the drive).....and they still had a defender on us the entire time. It was the first time we had people coming up to tell us they expected us to win the regional (sadly we didn't...and sadly that attention may have been our downfall).
ED v. 8.0 was engineered better than most of our bots, and accomplished tasks with simplicity and elegance. While it didn't have our 2003-2004 custom 2-speeds, it did use an AndyMark shifters, each with 2 small CIMs. It had a 6WD, using 6" AM Performance wheels, with nitrile roughtop tread (much more durable than our rubber wedgetop that we used last year), and approximate speeds of ~10fps and ~4fps. It also was capable of climbing every ramp we attempted.
We once again used our award-winning modular control box design developed in the summer of 2004, but added new features (including a LCD display for basic diagnostics and autonomous play selection/parameters).
Our arm had only 2 points of rotation, at the shoulder and wrist. The shoulder was powered by two globe motors at a speed fast enough we decided to reduce it in our controls (but with more than adequate torque). Both our pinching gripper and wrist were actuated by pneumatics, and rotated around the same point. The arm had a single-time telescoping extension (powered by surgical tubing) that would fire at the beginning of the match then latch in the extended position, allowing for us to pick up off the ground, start with a keeper in our grasp, and score on all three levels.
Our autonomous was dead reckoning for all of VCU, and for our first few matches at Championship, but when we got our camera fully operational, it jumped in accuracy greatly (2x as many hits in <1/3 the attempts). Our autonomous was guided mainly by our camera and gyro (and the potentiometer on our arm), and once we had the camera operational, we were one of the most reliable auto team on Galileo.
It was also one of our most robust and reliable machines, experiencing very few failures of any kind during the season (and none we couldn't fix).
We also had a lift system that functioned, but never made it onto the robot (due to some issues with figuring out how to have both the platforms and start with a keeper, among other issues).
2007 was a good year for 116 in many regards, and this robot was our best.
Pics:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/185/4...e904f4.jpg?v=0