FRC488 2012 -- Gojira

[Madison]

I wish I had better pictures or more video to offer right now, but I wanted to get something up here in advance of our competition next week in Texas and our practice robot is a sad state of affairs right now.

Existing video: youtube.com/teamxbot

These were taken as the robot was being crated up, so they're not the most telling photographs.



The above shows the right side, with the collector on one end (toward the right in this photo), our ball storage system and elevator on the near side, and catapult in the middle.



This is the left side; nothing very exciting going on here, but you might be able to get a better look at the catapult.

Technical Stuff:

Drive--
- 4 CIM motors through AM Super Shifters power 8 6" AM Plaction Wheels with roughtop tread
- Servo shift
- Passes over barrier with the aid of HDPE skids at the front and rear (missing in these photos because they were in the way of the shipping straps)
- Delrin wheel pod plates
- Pneumatic brakes

Collector--
- Driven by 1 RS-775-18 motor through a CIM-U-Lator gearbox
- Uses polycord belting to drive the intake roller
- Intake roller has some spiraled surgical tubing on it to encourage balls to move to one side of the collector
- Can store no more than there balls in the collector at a time; if a fourth comes in, it knocks out one of the others
- Raised and lowered by two 1.5" bore pneumatic cylinders so that it...
- Can lower the bridge; this was tested on a properly weighted bridge
- Can raise a horizontal bridge, lowering the opposite side
- Can stop a bridge from rotating beyond horizontal by acting as a stop below the bridge
- Dumps balls into storage when its raised back into the robot

Storage--
- Can store three balls inside the robot for travel
- Is hard to see in pictures because it's made almost entirely of polycarbonate

Elevator--
- Uses a small bore, long stroke cylinder to raise one ball at a time into catapult cup
- Has state-of-the-art rubber band system in place for keeping balls from rolling below it when its raised and jamming the works
- Needs a little more attention than it's received so far, but it works well enough for now

Catapult--
- Uses camera/vision processing software magic to align the chassis with the hoop and find the distance to the backboard.
- Automatically adjusts firing range and arc based on distance
- Can score from the fender to about 25' away
- Uses two 2" bore, short stroke cylinders and a simple linkage to fire
- Uses 5 solenoid valves and a servo-driven ball valve to do all of the above



The above is a schematic of how our pneumatic system is laid out. Yeah.

So, that's it. I wish I had some more interesting pictures to share, but these'll do for now.

We're competing in San Antonio, TX next weekend and in Seattle during week 4. Ask questions if you've got 'em! We're really happy with our finished product this season -- it's been very effective in testing and practice and we're happy that it's not just another wheeled shooter -- though we did prototype one of those.