Quote:
Originally Posted by jamie_1930
This is my question to everyone, because this is automatically what I thought when I saw this robot last year. How many other people automatically when they saw GUS say to themselves "dang they got it dead on, and why didn't we think of that". It's an amazing design and above all it's simplistic, which we should all strive for in our designs.
And my question to GUS is this, how did you assemble your conveyer belts? 2228 used a very similar looking system. We took aluminum tubes and riveted wedge top in small sections to create channels for polycord to ride in. This worked pretty well, but on our elevator conveyer the polycord would often slip out, even in competition, and this proved the biggest disadvantage of our system.
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Thanks!
Elegantly simple is our design motto.
Originally the robot was designed to use foam between the polycord loops. This didn't work so well, as the foam from McMaster was a lot softer than we were expecting. So we replaced it with neoprene roughtop belting, with PVC pipe spacers on some of the rollers. The rollers were originally PET-G, but upgraded to aluminum as part of the 40lb allowance.
We had some minor issues with the polycord loops "jumping" from one track to another, but these only happened if for some reason there was a Orbit ball jam in the system, and were usually limited to one or two loops total moving over one or two spots throughout the entire match. Because the loops were close enough together, this usually didn't negatively impact operation. Had we installed sensors on the robot to detect jams, we could have easily averted most of these issues.
Other than popping one or two of the loops back into their tracks at the end of every match, nothing else on this robot ever required any sort of maintenance or repair. Our students even got into the habit of cleaning the fingerprints off the Lexan side panels in the pits just to have something to do.
There was just a single part throughout the entire season (Connecticut, Championship, BattleCry@WPI, Where's Wolcott, Bash@theBeach) that required any kind of repair, and that was
the 3/8" drive shaft on the ball intake bent slightly during a particularly nasty impact in autonomous at BattleCry@WPI. Even though it was bent and made angry noises, it still worked for the rest of the competition. We machined a replacement shortly thereafter, and it's been working great since.
Here's some photos of the spacers from our team's website:
(Hurray for the duct tape rule! We used small strips of it to prevent the #8-32 button head screws from backing out of the aluminum drive plugs, since even with Loctite we noticed them slowly backing out on the practice robot before our first Regional)
