pic: 3572's bot coming together

[MrBasse]

loading photo ...

[sometimestommy]

very nice. I love the quotes on the back wall! one quick question. What is the angled piece on the left side of the picture for?

[CalTran]

Hazarding a guess I would say bridge/ball manipulation

[notmattlythgoe]

Looks like it picks up the balls and feed them to the shooter.

Great looking robot! What kind of pneumatic wheels are those in the center, and on your shooter?

[Madison]

Is the intent here to lower the collector on top of a ball and pop it up through the PVC rollers? Or to scoop a ball up from below by pushing the rollers under the ball?

How do balls that are at either side of the collector find their way into the center and into the shooter?

This is not unlike a concept we toyed with for awhile.

[Tom I]

This is a really good demonstration of multi-purpose components. That arm appears to be able to pick up balls, manipulate the ramp, and potentially help get over the barrier... that's a pretty impressive work-horse!

[team222badbrad]

Originally Posted by Tom I

This is a really good demonstration of multi-purpose components. That arm appears to be able to pick up balls, manipulate the ramp, and potentially help get over the barrier... that's a pretty impressive work-horse!

They are not the only ones! :-)

We have a similar "bucket loader".

Nice work. It looks like you have some work yet to do on getting the balls from the bucket to the shooter though.

[MrBasse]

The angled piece up front is in fact for picking up balls and pushing down the ramp. We have two cylinders driving it, and it is flow controlled but can still come down with quite the wallop. The pneumatic tires are the Harbor Freight variety that we had set up for a six wheel drive with non-marring wheelchair tires on them. Our robot turned out to be quite heavy with our original plan so we shed 45lbs in about fifteen minutes by taking off our old method of wheel articulation and came up with a newer lighter model...

As for centering the ball onto the fixed shooter, we plan to build a two stage funnel system that will have one half connected to the pick up and the other half mounted on the upper part of the super structure.

Thanks for the comments, we are really trying to make our robot perform well this year, but have it look really nice while doing it too. We always joke that when you build something that is nice and organized you always have to butcher it to fix things on it, but planning has paid off so far and our systems have stayed mostly where we had originally planned. It's going to be super nice to have a single board of pneumatics and another board that is solely electronics.

We have everything plumbed and wired as of tonight and ran some manual tests and everything works just the way it should...just have to build the funnel and put some protective shields on it and we should be good.

[MrBasse]

Originally Posted by Madison

Is the intent here to lower the collector on top of a ball and pop it up through the PVC rollers? Or to scoop a ball up from below by pushing the rollers under the ball?

How do balls that are at either side of the collector find their way into the center and into the shooter?

This is not unlike a concept we toyed with for awhile.

Forgot to answer this one in my earlier post... We plan to push down over the ball using a smaller opening and relying on the ball compressing through the opening. If need be we could run it into an obstacle like a fork lift though. The rollers run on our bumpers so if we are pushing a ball with the bumper we just slap the lifter on the ground and we have the ball in posession.