Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Fultz
I think a key came with how you interpreted and defined the problem -
If you interprete "hang" - then you focused on grabbing the top and pulling yourself up.
If you interpreted "get the robot higher than the platform" - then that opened up a lot of different ideas.
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We didn't start working on this feature until the last week of the build season. As others have said, we weren't sure it was worth it for just two points. Our base robot was pretty heavy (a very rugged frame) so we didn't have much weight to allocate to the hanging mechanism. We considered grabbing one or two vertical poles and flipping up but didn't think we could get the mechanism working in just a couple of days. The hanger we ended up with was pretty reliable, very lightweight and very easy to develop. We designed it to work on the side bumps for two reasons: we decided fewer robots would attempt to hang from the side and the distance we had to lift was much less. Our mechanism was not as fast as others but was still pretty fair. In one match, our driver was defending in the far zone, scored, crossed the far bump, climbed onto the near bump, moved into position and hung - all in the last 13 seconds. Not too bad for a very simple mechanism. The design had nothing to do with how the problem was interpreted - the design was the result of practical considerations.