pic: Robot is coming together....

[J_Miles]

Originally Posted by Bob Steele

If your intent is to make a structure with the minimum weight and a definable way of transfering energy (either from gravity or collision or something else..) then triangles are the way to go.

For sure. Generally when we lighten our robot, we arbitrarily take out material in areas of low stress, but when we want to eliminate serious amounts of material and retain a LOT of strength, we have some of our more mathematically-inclined students and our resident structural engineer go to work. For example, our lifter from last year had to be strong enough to support 450 pounds of load (which it never used, sadly), yet still needed to be strong, so we did all of the stress analysis and turned the main support member into a truss, which I guess is two adjacent triangles.