[darist]

James, I love where you are going with this, mostly because it is very simple but yet very flexible.

I love the velcro idea great because it will be very easy to make almost any minibot instantly compatible with this deployment mechanism, even for teams that never saw this thread, they can do it in 5min at the competition.

Another good thing is that it requires no communication between hostbot and minibot.

It allows for the hostbot to implement any kind of deployment mechanism they want, as long as somehow that tray gets pushed up against the post. So, one team may dream up a slide-out mechanism, another may have an arm that rotates out, or an arm that rotates from a vertical position to the position indicated by the drawing... etc

Then of course, the one thing I worry about with this design is (ironically) the velcro. The requirement is that the hostbot places the minibot on the post and then pulls away. The minibot will have to be designed to hold on to that post pretty hard (somebody who didn't read about this standard may not do that). Or, on the other hand, if the velcro doesn't hold on hard enough, the minibot can come flying on a collision during the match.