[rick.oliver]

For those of you interested, there are a few videos posted on YouTube of MOJO in action at the Cleveland Regional. Search on "Cleveland Regional" and they'll come up. Don't ignore the Chicken Dance Video, that is probably the most revealing of them all.

Like many of you, we've been practicing our driving in an attempt to improve on our performance. We also plan a couple of minor upgrades that we hope will also make an improvement in our performance.

Our hopper holds 20+ moon rocks and we can empty it in less than 3.5 seconds by raising the floor with a lead screw that is powered by a CIM motor. Our acquistion is also powered by a CIM and consists of a conveyor belt that contacts the game piece near the front of the machine and pulls them up and deposits them into the hopper. We designed the machine to be able to load from the top or the floor. We did not use the top loading and plan to sacrifice that capability to upgrade our unloading accuracy. We have four wheels driven by two CIM motors (one on each side). We use a rotary bar with vinyl "fingers" powered by a FP motor using the AM planetary gear box.

We can handle empty cells by either sweeping them into the hopper and dumping them at the refueling station or by drawing them into the conveyor system and then reversing the motor to discharge them into the refueling station.

Our Payload specialist was pretty accurate in Cleveland and the various published data based on the different algorithms are pretty close to our demonstrated capability. Our own scouting data shows that we averaged 10 moon rocks scored by the machine per match.

We hope to improve on that in Atlanta.