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Posted by Mike McIntyre.   [PICTURE: SAME | NEW | HELP]


Coach on team #1, Juggernaut, from Oakland Technical Center Northeast and 3 Dimensional Services.

Posted on 4/2/2000 4:59 AM MST


In Reply to: Re: #1 lifted #201 -- no call... posted by P.J. Baker on 3/28/2000 9:32 AM MST:



Let me clarify Erin's comment: when she says we've gotten people off the bar before, she didn't mean by lifting them straight into the air. What we try to do is push them off and, since we are an angular robot going up an angular plane, the pushing does have an upward component to the force. We push them low and try to swing them out and off of the bar; although we are unable to get most robots off this way, we do sometimes manage to clear a place for ourselves. Sometimes, the robot being pushed falls on top of us and hurts us pretty badly (as the Delphi Knights did in Michigan). The instance everybody's been writing about was not a case of us trying something 'just to see if (we) could get away with it.' We had fallen on our face and were righting ourselves. The first thing I asked the drivers after the match was 'Did you try to lift Rochester up?' and they replied immediately that they were actually just trying to get themselves up but were happily surprised to see (them) lift right off the bar as we righted ourselves.

Personally, I would have a problem with widescale lifting of other teams off of the bar, (I think there will be too many destroyed robots out there) and, now that we know how to do it, everybody else with any kind of an elevator system can do it too. I am not sure where FIRST will be able to draw a clear line, though: whenever you push a robot that's clamped onto a bar you naturally apply a torque and an upward rotation occurs. I'm glad I'm not a ref...