Most successful claw design?

[Basel A]

Originally Posted by Colin P

Bionic Barons have the best I've seen in person. It's a REALLY wide roller claw. The big spatula rollers seem to be the best overall. Claws that ride parallel to and an inch above the ground have the best gathering capability.

Snappers, as I like to call them, are fast at picking up tubes, but slow to score. A robot with a jointed arm and a pinching action claw is what i'd call a snapper.

Rollers are a bit slower at collecting tubes, but are unmatched in scoring speed. Working rollers against one another to articulate tubes is probably the best design for a robot with a jointed arm.

Elevator robots with inside tube collectors are the other best design, but the two are hard to compare.

What I liked about roller claw pickup was that teams could run into a tube, then immediately move backwards. No driver expertise needed.

What I liked about claw and inside tube scorers is that they don't affect the tube when they let go. Roller claws must spit a tube out, which can cause bounce and possible descoring. Grabbers can just let go.

That said, successful pickup and scoring is possible with any general design concept.

[Vikesrock]

Roller claws appear to be the best by far at tube acquisition. What seperates the good roller claws from the great ones is how to spit the tubes out. With the smaller foot and no "stinger" it is much tougher this year to keep the tube on the rack than it was in '07.

Many of the best roller claws appear to attack this issue by using a pneumatics to open the jaws and release the tube instead of rolling it out.

[Wayne TenBrink]

There are a lot of good roller claws out there, but I submit our pincher for your consideration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qEr4...eature=related

(Note: The sticky minibot deployment shouldn't be an issue going forward)

[davidthefat]

This


No, but seriously I think the rollers were the best. But the rollers with an extending arm was the best combo.

[Basel A]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

No, but seriously I think the rollers were the best. But the rollers with an extending arm was the best combo.

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

Many of the best roller claws appear to attack this issue by using a pneumatics to open the jaws and release the tube instead of rolling it out.

It appears 2337 is better than I, or the seeding system, gave us credit for...

[Brian Ha]

I think the best one was a wide spatula claw. It didnt look like they had rollers. Basically that had a top spatula claw that was pneumatically fired and had a botton hand that had four fingers made of lexan that grabbed the tubes. If you dont know who this is its 2137. Their hand worked very well and effictively. So yeah thought it was cool.

[Owen Meaker]

Our team has a pnumatic grabber, with the addition of an automated grabbing mode. So theoretically we would have the ease of use of a roller claw with the ease of placing of a normal grabber.

However, this is theoretical, and we all know the difference between theory and practice.

[Koko Ed]

We are perfectly happy with our claw design. Even without rollers.

[Chris is me]

Rollers are great, given infinite weight, motors, and support. But that's rarely the case in robotic design.

The advantages of other claws aren't based on competitiveness, but on resources.

[CalTran]

I think clamp claws work well. Our team is great with hitting a tube and grabbing it on the go. Our claw is a bottom plate with a pneumatic clamp at the top. Then we have something akin to a "tooth" to keep the tube in.

I also like how Team 1986, Team Titanium, has their manipulator.

[artdutra04]

I may be biased but narrow roller claws work like a charm. They very quickly acquire tubes, very quickly score tubes, and depending on their implementation can easily hold tubes from "impossible" positions, like the very corner of triangles or squares.