[jamie_1930]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

I for one am a little weary on the idea that drivers are going to easily be able to grab onto my robot in the right place while begin many feet away and not have a clear line of sight. I don't want a driver to miss and then accidentally rip out my electronics or a piece of the robot that wasn't designed to hold 150 lbs.

So yes adding a bar is an easy solution to getting robots suspended, but you have to think about the trust you are putting into another team to not rip your robot to shreds. Not that you shouldn't trust other teams but when it comes to driving robots, as wells as driving a car in real life, i don't trust anyone to not make mistakes 100% of the time (myself included).

There is going to be a matter of trust on whether or not you are going to allow another team to use this method, but is something I think we'll be seeing this year. Also as far as the electronics go it is always a common theme for the games that you need to have a robust design, especially when it comes to electrical components, but you should have these components well protected even if you don't plan on doing this.

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

That's the exact opposite of what the original idea of the designs being tossed around in this thread is, though. There are multiple potential methods for lifting an entire alliance regardless of whether or not the other two members were designed to hang. If those 8 points are going to be a large part of your teams' strategy, finding a way to get robot who aren't designed to hang into a suspended position will be a big part of your design challenge.

Beyond that, simply assuming putting a bar in the air will be sufficient for another robot to hang off of you is still awfully presumptuous. You will have to factor in how another robot hanging off of yours impacts your CG (and how that impacts both robots), where that bar will be relative to the field, how to lower each robot at the end of a match, how to avoid complications due to size restraints and the finale configuration (ie, will the haning robot have to be in contact with the tower to get into their finale configuration and can they hang from you if they're contacting the tower?), how to avoid potential damage from hanging mechanisms and suspended robots, and how to elevate (and keep elevated without power) more weight. None of these are trivial questions.

I still think that a simple bar would be an easy solution and I think you should be able to coordinate this maneuver with little complications. Although I just went back to reread the original post and realized how far off topic I've taken this, so I'll finish here.