Our Robot weight woes.. to rebuild or not to rebuild

[Kevin Sevcik]

Welcome to the wonderful world of weight loss! We recommend that you weigh in early and often so you won't come back to visit next season.

Unless you know where all that extra weight is coming from, building an entirely new robot in 9.5 hours isn't going to save you. You're just as likely to end up with a second overweight robot. If you DO know where all the extra weight is coming from, then you should be looking at removing those systems/parts to make your weight.

Looking at your picture, it's difficult to see where all of that weight is actually coming from. Until you can provide more and closer pictures of the robot, I'll throw out some general purpose weight loss guidelines:

1. Steel is heavy. Anywhere there's steel on your robot is a place to reduce weight by removing it or replacing it with Aluminum.
2. Flat sheet and plate are heavier than thinner sheet and plate with a tube supporting it. Look for large expanses of thick plate material and see if you can replace it with thinner material with a tube or beam supporting it. (I'm looking at that Lexan electronics board).
3. Motors are heavy. If you're using a bigger motor than you need for a task, look at swapping in a smaller, lighter one.
4. Pneumatics can be heavy. If you're using pneumatics, make sure you're using the lighest, smallest cylinders possible, and look at using plastic air tanks and keeping the compressor off-board.
5. Subsystems are heavy. Seeing as how a subsystem is guaranteed to have a combination of all of the above, subsystems are very heavy. The absolute quickest way to lose weight and become legal is to ditch an entire subsystem. Which system you ditch would depend on your priorities and the relative weights of the systems. Offhand, I would suggest that a turret on an overweight robot is about as useful as a bicycle for a fish. If I could ditch everything for the turret and have a fixed shooter on a legal robot, I would do that in a heartbeat.