How to get the mini bot down

[jamie_1930]

It seems like every time I meet with someone or talk with someone about the mini bot they have 3 stock questions/comments.

1. Everyone on CD says they can do it in 1.5 seconds, how are we supposed to compete with that?

2.How do we deploy it?

and this threads topic

3.How do we get it down?

I've been wondering this and the way we designed our mini bot, and the common theme I see with many, it would not be good to just reverse the motors, seeing it would just shoot down at over 32.2ft/s^2. While pondering this I was thinking

-Well why don't I just climb the pole and get it, well cause a few hundred people would yell at me for not being safe and wouldn't let me do it again.

-How about shaking the pole, same reason as not reversing the motors except this time it won't have such a predictable landing spot.

-Next was the giant pool skimmer idea, why not get a long pole with a net on the end, cause there's got to be a better way (although still plausible)

My final thought and question to you now is, why not just tip the tower over. Looking at the design of the tower it is connected to the field with just velcro, so are we allowed to just tip the pole over?