Climbing Safety

[THE DYNAMO]

Has anyone thought about how the electronics, battery, and other sensitive components will be mounted this year on climbing robots? They will have to withstand a great deal of movement, and possibly a large fall. Ideas anyone?

[BigJ]

Don't fall

[THE DYNAMO]

that sounds like the words written under 'alliance selection strategy' on our whiteboard last year: "don't suck"

[ferret_guy]

I was thinking mounting everything excpt the battery on compressor style vibration dapners wont do much but will help and putting the battery in a foam cutout

[Whippet]

I think that it would be a good idea to attach your robot to a belay system while practicing, so that if it falls then, the results wouldn't be quite as catastrophic. You should probably have figured out what will make your robot fall and how to avoid those situations come competition time.

*deposits $0.02*

[MrForbes]

Climbing sure looks like a red herring.....

[camalex3999]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

Climbing sure looks like a red herring.....

I disagree if you can consistently climb to the 3rd level and possibly dump four colored disks in the top goal you would be a very valuable alliance member. If you are in an alliance with a robot who can shoot very accurately and another robot who plays defense or possibly feeds the first robot disks from across the field then your alliance would be nearly unstoppable. But you would still need to be able to climb consistently.

[pfreivald]

In designing our climber, one of our design constraints was to always have at least three points of contact with the tower, and to be able to lose power (or be disabled) at any time with zero risk of falling (barring ridiculous things like shearing large amounts of metal).

If we couldn't figure out a legal method with those constraints, the decision was to not even try to go beyond ten points.

[Garrett.d.w]

We are working on a climbing bot, our strategy is to not fall. If we do fall, then we are designed to (hopefully) catch ourselves before we hit the ground using a series of large hooks on the bot. If we do hit the ground, the chassis is designed to be a roll cage. We would probably be out for the rest of the day, but the season would be salvageable.

For practice, we are working on a belay system. Several of our members have some training regarding indoor rock climbing, they will be in charge of keeping the robot off of the floor.