Let's See Your Robot's Battle Scars

[philso]

We were competing in Dallas this past weekend and experienced some "contact within our frame perimeter" causing our pneumatic shooter to stop working.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos?pid=5991806169142267842&oid=100961862719407 130044

Looking around the pits at the other robots, I saw a bent frame and collector on one of the top robots. Another had a severely bent shooter which was quickly fixed. I later saw that same shooter caught under some frame members that it had no business being under. The team members had to use brute force to flex the shooter and frame to get it back out.

Our driver collided with one of the top robots, knocking the power cable out of their router and stopping them for the rest of the match. One of Spectrum's alliance partners suffered a broken collector but managed to use it to make one last pass to Spectrum for assist points. One of the robots in the semi-finals or finals was dragging an air tank as it drove around the field for a good part of the match. Surprisingly, it did not pop off nor did another robot run over it in all the chaos.

[who716]

our ball pick up was actually designed with the purpose of getting hit and bent, we made is so that if its gets bent and warped out of shape they will still work for the rest of the match, and we made them so they are very easy to replace a simple clamp you remove and they slide out, we then produced about 5 of them so that after a match in which it get bent we can replace it with a new one then straighten the bent one as much as possible during some down time so that we can re use it if needed, works absolutely perfect At WPI we replaced the sticks twice during the entire competition, took about 30 seconds to do so.

[Trish Fisher]

Originally Posted by Sparky3D

Actually, those cylinders are entirely within our bumper zone. But we will be adding some additional protection for them at Wisconsin.

I'm sorry for your damage. How are you going to add protection for them, we have a similar design.
Thanks!

[nathannfm]

Day 1 at SCH

• An obliterated camera mount and LED ring
• 2 ruined drive pulleys (both our fault, 1 touching the cart when testing, the other got Loctite on it a while ago and just failed)
• Intake roller shaft belt way out of place
• 4 intake cylinders bent (we actually managed to bend them back in place the 2nd day as we ran out of spares )

Day 2 at SCH

• 2 more bent intake cylinders, by this point we repositioned them to a more protected spot on the robot.
• A sheared off Performance wheel (I know, I know, only 3 bolts, we were in a hurry from the loctite pulley )
• A little something unexpected

[AustinH]

1st match of the day in Mt Vernon on Saturday. Our loader got hooked in some manner and failed spectacularly. Had the spare swapped in and running 5 minutes later and we were 100% up and running in time for the next match.

Redundancy and resiliency are critical this year.

We kept the trashed loader as a keepsake

[tickspe15]

Originally Posted by AustinH

1st match of the day in Mt Vernon on Saturday. Our loader got hooked in some manner and failed spectacularly. Had the spare swapped in and running 5 minutes later and we were 100% up and running in time for the next match.

Redundancy and resiliency are critical this year.

We kept the trashed loader as a keepsake

did anything actually break? It looks like everything came apart at the connectors. Were you using PVC cement?

[AustinH]

Originally Posted by tickspe15

did anything actually break? It looks like everything came apart at the connectors. Were you using PVC cement?

Yeah, everything was glued. There are actually chunks of shattered pipe in those connectors. Normally the passive PVC loader design we used had a ton of extra flexibility. Not this time.

[Zuelu562]

We have a pinch guard over the drive pulleys of our forward intake motor which, when down, happens to be the outermost point of the robot. We crunched that 1/16 inch aluminum at least once each match, and that's our only real battle scar, unless you want to count a robot cutting through 4 layers of bumper material...

[s_forbes]

Half way through one of our qualifying matches, we found that we were driving with what seemed to be 50% of our normal drivetrain power. Pulled it out after the match to find this.

2 of our wheels were gummed up with field marking tape. One of the kit hex bearings broke as well, I suspect as a result of the immense belt load seen when driving with our clogged pulleys.

[Ghost_Pack]

Can anyone top 801 and 1592's 2013 trailer accident?
http://oi57.tinypic.com/3507wag.jpg
http://oi61.tinypic.com/110eu5i.jpg

[MetalJacket]

Didn't get any pictures but we managed to crack welds on both our primary and backup intakes at the Virginia Regional. Fortunately we were able to get some nice gussets made up by the NASA machine shop and rivet everything back together .

[Ian Curtis]

This BAG on a 10:1 VP powers our intake. It spends most of its time inside our frame perimeter or out of the way above our roller claw. After our first QF match (or, at least we noticed it after our first QF match), it looked like this. Much to our surprise it continued working through the remaining QF and SF match ups. Once we can unbag, I can't wait to open it up and see what it looks like on the inside.



Our drivers station overhung our robot cart and got banged by a trophy case in the hall en route to a match. Of course, the laptop screen decided that this would be a great time to go belly up. Luckily, we had our classmate in the pit.

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

Half way through one of our qualifying matches, we found that we were driving with what seemed to be 50% of our normal drivetrain power. Pulled it out after the match to find this.

2 of our wheels were gummed up with field marking tape. One of the kit hex bearings broke as well, I suspect as a result of the immense belt load seen when driving with our clogged pulleys.

We've had about 10 of these in our drivetrain break.
They're significantly weaker than last year's hex bearings.
We actually ran Finals-3 of Tech Valley with a bearing and a wheel missing. 5 wheel drive instead of 6.
We're in the process of taking the 2013 bearings from last year's practice bot off to put on this year's robot.

Also at Tech Valley, in our first qualification match, our catapult snapped in two a few shots after a bad dryfire in autonomous.

[J@GMFlint]

Here's the front cross brace from our AM14U chassis during Eliminations at the GLBR District. This year we took a gamble with the KOP chassis for the first time, like many teams we also highly modified it -very little is left "stock" aside from hole patterns- and we actualy found it to be a great product/value. We also found it easy to interface with our staple building material, 80/20, making iterations and repair/replacement relatively easy.

[jeremylee]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

We had the same thing happen to us also causing us to miss an autonomous shot one match. I'm sure the field crew always wonders where all that tape goes.