Team 1197 - 1.4s Minibot Climb

[Torbots 1197]

After many weeks of tinkering with the minibot, we've finally arrived at a design that we're liking a lot. We've managed to break the 2 second barrier and have our design run up the pole in ~1.4 seconds, battery and all. Here's a teaser video of what we're bringing to the Los Angeles and Las Vegas regionals.

Good luck to all the Week 1 regional participants!

[nikeairmancurry]

Now do you have your depolyment system? Which is seeming to be more important than the minibot now..

[Torbots 1197]

Yea, we have a solid deployment system. During scrimmage, our driver was able to get it deployed within a second of the 10s mark

[Sunbun]

I leave, and this happens?

[team 3311]

A 1,4 second minibot is pretty impressing.

But I think that the deployment is more important. Just getting the minibot on the pull and having it running up will make a big difference already.
After this weekend I think that you can get a lot of points just by having a minibot.
The time is not that important.

But still pretty impressive what guys!

[MagiChau]

I would say make sure your deployment system is durable and reliable. Don't let that get damaged during the match before the protection of end-game. Defense could be aggresive to prevent robot(s) from having a chance to deploy.

According to others' opinions there could be a problem with triggering the tower due to the lack of contact time from the nature of fast minibots having a small contact time. Hopefully FIRST can manage to fix it before week 2 competitions though.

[Sunbun]

FYI, here's what 1197's doing for deployment. The minibot is an older model, but the new one's being worked on so it's compatible with the deployment system.

I haven't seen the robot in person, but from what I've heard, deployment works fine.

YouTube video

[WizenedEE]

Originally Posted by MagiChau

According to others' opinions there could be a problem with triggering the tower due to the lack of contact time from the nature of fast minibots having a small contact time. Hopefully FIRST can manage to fix it before week 2 competitions though.

The rules say 4N, if it exerts that much force on it, no sensor malfunctions or calibration will make them lose points.

That's not a bad looking minibot. From what I can tell, it's similar to ours, although ours is a lot bigger... apparently we'll get a custom frame on it to make it lighter though.

[klmx30302]

Nice minibot! Looking forward to seeing you at the Vegas Regional.

We decided to completely scrap our current minibot (3.5 sec climb) because it almost got us a red card at GSR because it kept falling off of our deployer if we were hit by another robot. Were currently designing a newer, faster one. The other advantage to it is that it uses 2 less pistons to deploy it (1 vs. 3).

[Torbots 1197]

Originally Posted by WizenedEE

The rules say 4N, if it exerts that much force on it, no sensor malfunctions or calibration will make them lose points.

That's not a bad looking minibot. From what I can tell, it's similar to ours, although ours is a lot bigger... apparently we'll get a custom frame on it to make it lighter though.

We were also concerned about the force that the minibot was exerting on the top plate, so we ran some tests using both an accelerometer to our cRIO paired with the smart dashboard data logging capabilities, with a wiimote wirelessly connected to a laptop for redundancy. From the results we got from the pair of accelerometers, we're hitting the top with at least 40N of force, giving a nice safety factor of 10.

[JamesCH95]

I like how the person who sets it on the pole makes sure to take off their safety glasses BEFORE turning it on

Come on people!