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Re: ball cannon???
Well after a thoroughly healthy discussion and brainstorming session tonight I have a few thoughts.
A basket idea is nice, but I believe that it is essential to have a system that can harvest balls (efficiently) from the floor of the arena and this is one of the things that is sacrificed by implementing a basket system that can dump left/right/forward. Also, with a basket I think that it is only worth it if it can hold large quantities of balls. So if it holds 5 and 3 go in and 2 miss, no big deal. But the thing is, that is the only time you can shoot so it (assuming that you have no harvesting system) so it better be perfect.
I think that if anything a herding bot should have some kind of offensive system (a basket would be the best), so when they get into a "sticky situation" they can maybe use it.
I think that a baseball type shooter is alright. There are some definite issues of how to get the ball into the elevator that feeds it. It really has to be a perfect scenario for a ball to find its way to the opening of the bot, not run away from it because it hit a part of the bumper, and get wedged into it and go up into the elevator. However, if you can get around this problem it's a decent system. This is because you can (potentially if your turret can rotate) drop/shoot balls into an enemy bot's trailer from all 3 sides of your robot! You can also control how many balls go into the trailer!
Lastly, I wanted to throw out another idea to the CD crow that I brought up tonight. I don't like it as much as a shooter, but maybe some team can get inspired by it.
I thought of having a robot whose front part of it's chassis is indented. This allows a place for balls to gather. A basket would scoop down and gather the balls. This would make the basket argument much more compelling, but it also raises a whole other set of problems. For instance you sacrifice precious space of your bot to accommodate the scooper, and I believe that a robot with a shorter width is very much essential for turning this year.
That's my $0.02!
p.s. I really had fun with BOLDING, underlining, and italicizing
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