Cannibalizing robots

[David Dawson]

Question. Do you think its ok to take apart robots of the past for parts. If so would you only take a piece or the the whole drive train. My team is currently debating if we want to keep our 2009 robot. And I need excuses to save its life .

[viperred396]

Originally Posted by David Dawson

Question. Do you think its ok to take apart robots of the past for parts. If so would you only take a piece or the the whole drive train. My team is currently debating if we want to keep our 2009 robot. And I need excuses to save its life .

we really don't like to take them apart but sometimes we have to. Just say that you need to keep them so that you have show them off when ever you need to

[Chris is me]

I would prefer to keep robots in tact, and that's what 1714 does, but 2791's 2009 robot is completely disassembled. Most of the robot's parts were used either in prototyping or on the competition robot, and we saved a few hundred dollars that way.

[davidthefat]

We just play around with the old robots, we sometimes pull off unnessary things then have the bare minimum

[Basel A]

Having old robots that work is pretty useful when you need to do demonstrations to younger students or to show off to prospective sponsors, etc. And then there's the emotional reason, when you ahve a personal connection to the robot. Heh.

[davidthefat]

Make the noob programmers program on the old robots to practice

[Radical Pi]

With the new control system being mostly reused every year, I have little hope for our 2010 bot. Unless of course we can get our team to spring for a new cRIO and a new set of jags...

We still have a few IFI bots though...offseason T-shirt launcher any1?

[Armonious]

I obviously see the value in keeping at least 1 robot intact. Usually, we cannibalize the previous years robot about a month before build season starts, as some of the parts generally get used to save on budget. We usually have something at least able to be driven around, though it is usually an off-season project using the old IFI system and not the cRIO (we only have 1).

[vivek16]

Granted we are only in our 4th year, we keep the good robots. Our rookie bot is totally gone, even the frame. 2008 is in pieces with no drivetrain and missing wiring. 2009 is completely intact since it is a good one for show (and a beast of a bot). We shall see about this year.

-Vivek

[JewishDan18]

We keep the basic robot (frame and drive train) together, but we take off the other parts as we need them.

[dtengineering]

Year 1: We finally got it working! There's no way we're taking this robot apart.

Year 2: Well, we need a few parts off last year's robot, and it really wasn't all that good, so maybe we'll just take a few things off it. It still looks like a moon buggy, and thats kind of cool.

Year 3: You know, that first robot doesn't work at all since we took the parts off of it last year. Let's take the control system and motors off, too, and build a practice robot this year.

Year 4: Lets take the motors off the practice robot we built last year to save some money on this year's machine, and we don't really have time to order new pneumatic parts, so let's grab them off the year 2 'bot.

Year 5: Okay, this is getting silly. We've got nowhere to put this year's robot. That old practice robot isn't working at all, so lets strip all the good stuff off of it. And that first year's robot... if we took the wheels off of it then we could store them under a table and... well... let's just take the whole chassis apart, but hang a fancy bit from the wall as a souvenir. And the third year's robot... well, it doesn't really need four CIMs in its drive train any more... it hasn't been in a pushing match for years now.

Year 6: Let's cut up the old chassis from the third year's practice robot and use that as spare aluminum to practice welding. And that second year robot... lets save its arm... that was a cool arm, but everything else can go in storage in a back room.

Year 7: Well, if we're building a practice robot this year we'll need the solenoid valves off of all our old robots, and the wheels... don't forget the wheels... let's recycle some of them. And we can pull the cRio off last year's machine... and lets take the Jags, too... we can replace them with an IFI control system later. And that Overdrive machine... we can re-use it's motors, too... may as well since we're pulling the solenoid valves off the launcher.

So... now we have one working Breakaway robot on its way back to us. One non-working breakaway practice robot awaiting an IFI control system and a replacement AM wheel (we broke one getting air off a bump in Seattle). One non-working Lunacy robot awaiting an IFI control system. One non-working Overdrive robot in need of CIMs and solenoids. One working Rack'n'Roll machine that we're all afraid to do too much to because we have misplaced the the source code to run PID mecanum wheels on all four corners off of interrupts, and none of us remember exactly how it all works, but think mecanum is just too cool to dismantle. One mostly working Aim High robot, with a fully operational pan and tilt nerf ball shooting turret that is just wayyy too cool to dismantle (some might argue whether Aim High was the best game ever, but it sure made for the best demo robots ever), and a collection of parts from the robots from our first two years.

I like to have one or two robots ready to go for a demonstration at all times... three is even nicer if they show off different abilities... but aside from that I think it makes sense to recycle parts and reduce storage space.

But I try to wait until the kids who built them are gone... or at least until they've fallen in love with a new machine.

Jason

[bigbeezy]

well unfortunatly our robots have been mostly disassembled.
Our Rookie bot (2005) is in pieces and it's my plan to rebuild it in my garage this summer.
our '06 bot is totally gone, just the cannon is left, but it doesnt work.
'07 is partially intact, wheels still on but no motors, arm is removed, limited electronics remaining
last i saw '08's drivetrain was gone and the arm was detached
'09 i believe is just missing the electronics panel

i really wish they all could be kept running, but mainly '05 since it was our 1st year and you can really tell how far the team has come along and improved over the years.

[blayde5]

Most of our robots before 2006 have been kept at an alumni's house and recently our stack attack robot has gone missing after we took it out of the big shipping containers our school has :O.

El Toro XII (Lunacy) has basically been sitting in the back of our room, gathering dust (luckily) which pleases me because I loved how it worked

El Toro XI (overdrive) was taken apart last year and the chassis was used at the Tech Challenge (in San Jose) before being completely dissasembled.

El Toro X (Rack 'n' Roll), the chassis is completely gone and only the riveted top part and the claw remain.

El Toro IX (Aim High) completely gone

El Toro VIII (Triple Play) I saw it somewhere 2 years ago... since then nothing xD. We do, however, have a tetra that the Sacramento Regional people wanted at last year's competition.

All the other robots are sitting in someone's garage. We usually keep the chassis and use it as a test robot for electrical while mechanical builds the robot

[qwertyuiop[]\]

1. Do you have enough space to keep that much junk lying around? (Calling a robot junk is questionable but often applicable) my school has about enough space for a backlog of 2 robots so thats what we keep. really thats only the result of lazyness. if we werent lazy there would be no robots out in that shed.
2. What are you going to gain? if you want to train drivers, only keep a drive train. if you want to train programmers, again keep a drive train. if you only have a drive train this is much easier to store.If you want to use it to demonstrate to sponsors scrap the old robot and use the new one. Sponsors like to see the most recent robot.
3. Parts. old robots have so many valuable parts in them that you can reuse. my team has used the same banebots transmissions for 3 years running. old robots house a plethora of useful stuff (including the CRIO and other electronics). Really keeping old robots is a matter of are you willing to keep buying a new crio every year or retrofitting the old control system to the robot.

Basically if you have lots of sponsor money and sponsor space then keep the old robot but if you just a team running out of a school with limited space and budget then definetly RECYCLE(cannibalizing sounds so savage) the robot.

[Vermeulen]

We kept our 2008 robot because it looks impressive, and we can show it off, we kept our rookie robot because nobody had the heart to disassemble it, and we tried to keep our 2009 robot, but it got the electrical stuff taken out for this year's robot, and we needed the gearboxes and some bearings for our driver training robot. All of our other robots were taken apart.