[archiver]

Posted by Wayne Cokeley at 03/27/2001 7:57 PM EST


Coach on team #25, Raider Robotix, from North Brunswick Twp. H.S. and Bristol-Myers Squibb.


In Reply to: Xerox Award Winners
Posted by ChrisH on 03/27/2001 1:13 AM EST:



: I would like to put together an article on the robot features that won the Xerox creativity awards. The purpose would be to try and get it published in a national engineering magazine and showcase the innovation that happens in these competitions.

: While I can find out from the FIRST website WHO the award winners are, it does not cite the features of the robots that impressed the judges enough to make the award.

: I realize that there are many innovative features that were included in most of the robots. Even some robots that do nothing but limbo sometimes have innovative features. But with a 4 or 5 page (or paragraph) article I just can't cover them all. So I thought that limiting the list to award winners would keep things down to a managable size. (14 robots is still probably too many, but it's easier to manage than 500)

: So IF your robot won a Xerox Creativity award AND you remember what feature the judges cited in presenting the award would you please e-mail me? I have some questions I would like to ask. Also if you have some pictures of your feature(s) you could send it would be helpful. Or I can talk to you in FL

: We could just hope that the engineering media will come to us, but if one of us who understands the game starts things, it's much more likely that things won't get garbled by the time they reach print (or electrons). Even if my version doesn't get printed and I just hand it over to some reporter, at least I'll know that the facts were straight when they got it.

: Chris Husmann
: Team 330 the Beach'Bots
: (Who got a Xerox Award for our lift that picks up two balls simultaneously and rotates them into scoring position)


Hi Chris- Our robot Robo Kong got the award in NJ (2nd year in a row)for our arm mechanism for jumping the midfield wall. You can visit our site at the link below to see the features. Or, better yet, drop by our pits in Orlando and take a look.
I took a look through the web pages of all the teams listed by FIRST as the winners of the award and was saddened to see that only one of them had a picture of their machine on their site and only a few even had sites at all!

Interestingly, we considered building an arm with a double pickup and placement mechanism similar to yours but by the time we got the wall jumping mechanism built our weight was too high. It seems like every year we discuss a bunch of possible designs for the robot and every one shows up somewhere in the competition. It's nice to see the creativity.

WC