What is your teams (general) robot design? (2015)

[Donut]

Standard kit chassis, forklifts on an elevator, nothing too radical for us. The biggest debate right now is building a simple arm to grab containers or adjusting the fork width to use the same mechanism. Going to stack only moving one tote high, then grab bottom and repeat, hopefully we will keep the robot height under 42" so we can leave our forks permanently on and move the robot on its back to satisfy the transport configuration.

One thing we are doing different is we are going to grab totes from the wide side, we felt the blocks that extend down 1-2" around the handles are a sturdier place to hold from than the lip of the totes. We're also toying with grabbing two totes at a time for each layer since they are arranged nicely in pairs in the landfill, and the approach from the wide side facilitates this since there is no need for a middle support. If it doesn't pan out we'll cut the forks shorter for just one tote. I hope it works though as I really want to see us trying to drive around with two stacks of 4-6 totes in tow.