Climbing Mechanism Ideas

[RRLedford]

This year's rule limiting horizontal size AT ALL TIMES to staying within a 54" cylinder is very severe in light of the sloping nature of the climbing challenge.

How many people realize that if your robot is a cube of just over 31" on a side, then your diagonal is already at the 54" size limit.

So suppose that during climbing your robot flips around or swings some as it transitioning levels, well you better not have a very tall or wide robot, or you are going to have one of your diagonal dimensions exceed the 54" diameter limit.

We are thinking of having our robot lean over 30 degrees onto the pyramid corner, and establish a contact zone that bridges the dihedral angle, for extra stability as we transition the rungs, especially at the point where robot sits on only one rung while reaching for the next

However, we then realized that this 30 degrees of lean over will SEVERELY limit what our initial footprint can be.

Has your team taken this into consideration?
What is the longest DIAGONAL dimension of your robot going to be, and how will robot movements during climbing cause this dimension to GROW in the horizontal projection of its length?

There are going to be a lot of penalties for teams who overlook this.
I see people talking about deploying gripper arms to swing themselves upward, but I suspect that unless they are very small, they will exceed the 54" horizontal diameter limit.

Many other ideas being described are not taking this factor into consideration.

My own opinion is that with this games design, there should have been some horizontal expansion allowance for robots in contact with the pyramid.

-Dick Ledford