2011 Curie Division

[Kevin Sevcik]

Alright, fine. So here's 57 along with some brief specs. Pictures courtesy Ron Gillory, http://www.sezron.com:
- Half-Octanum* drive (4 Mecanums, 2 Stickies), never measured it, but about 12-15fps in Mecanum
- Pivot-telescoping arm
- Spring-loaded Roller Claw, driven by two independent RS-395s through 131:1 P60s. Spring loading = Who cares about over-inflation? Also, rotating a square around the corner is just amusing.
- New for Champs, 1.2s (fully charged) minibot, with a pretty reliable and forgiving deployment. Should be about 1.5-1.7 with deploy.
- Reliable High-Uber Autonomous, once we work out the distances.
- Regularly scoring 2 High logos by our lonesome.

I'm rather pleased with the whole robot at this point. Our biggest letdown was our original Big'n'Slow(tm) minibot that didn't even benefit from reliability. We've since cribbed notes from the Discobots (2587), improving their design and working out a rather faster "align-wait-fire" style deployment system. I'm told by my students and co-mentors that I'm banned from further tweaking on the minibot, so this looks like what we're going with.

The only thing I'd change at this point is the half-Octanum*. We started with a whole Octanum* and ended up about 6 lbs over, so the choice was pretty obvious. If anyone has 6 lbs of robot weight to lend us, we'd looooove to toss the other half on. As it is, we'll have it available to us at Champs to swap in some lower geared stickies, and in case of extreme emergency. (eg. Oh no, the arm's a pretzel!)

*Yes, I know the accepted spelling is Octocanum. I think mine's easier to say and just as descriptive.