pic: Size comparison.

[Alex.q]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

I really can't understand why everyone's complaining about their robot having to be smaller. Every year I've been on the team (w/ the exception of 2007 which was a bad idea) we've built the frame 2" undersized; 36"x26".
This year, our frame is STILL 36"x26".

Kudos to the first person who figures out how we managed to build a 36"x26" frame while still obeying all rules.

I can think of a number of ways to do this: A flop bot would be relatively easy to implement I believe, if weren't for the pesky bumpers at starting config, but it could still be done. You could have one side of the drive fold out, but that would be inefficient space wise and probably wouldn't give you the best performance--unless you designed somehow to get around that. OR, on the same train of thought here, if you had 2 sides of your frame connected in the middle with heavy duty linear sliders, you could just slide the base farther apart. That would be pretty cool to see, but I feel like it would give you structural issues. The reason people complain about the design is because the simplest solution is to just build a smaller bot (unless you know something I dont).