Catching a ball

[nixiebunny]

Originally Posted by YCJeon772

Alright. Did anyone think of trying to catch a ball with the same arm mechanism to pick up the balls from the ground? It would be more difficult, but could be possible to catch it in the air.

We considered this, and concluded that it makes more sense to have a catching mechanism on the rear of the robot and a top-roller floor pickup on the front, or somesuch.

The floor pickup is useful for retrieving balls, and can reverse its drive to be a floor spitter, to either do floor passes to other bots, or to put the ball in the low goal.

The catcher wants to be able to get balls from either human players or other bots. We will first try to make a human-tossed ball catcher, and see if it can be made big enough to accept balls from other bots. Bounce deadening is quite the thing.

Another idea, more crazy of course, is to make the ball catcher like a Venus flytrap, with wide-open hoops on the sides that close in on the ball as soon as a pressure sensor plate detects that a ball inside it.