Unique robot design?

[MathFreak]

I feel like many teams have almost the same robot design this year: meaning that the chassis is designed so that the robot can take 'in' the totes. Does any team have a unique robot design or strategy? I believe our robot is a little different from the common dedign(its not fully built yet so i cant show you how it looks like). Pictures would be great!

[MrForbes]

You can't make a post like that, and not include pictures or drawings of your robot design!



I think we will see a whole bunch of unique robot designs over the next ten days.

[Joseph Smith]

You'll find plenty of people eager to share their unique designs in about two weeks. Until then I doubt you'll get much.

[MathFreak]

Right, we all will be presenting robots in about 10 days!
I asked that just because I didn't see what kind of team could get a remarkably high score. The field is separated this year and it's a totally different game from the others. The amount of score a robot can get is in a way limited(because of # of totes and those)…

[Zach101]

I feel like the two different designs this year are going to be able to lift the totes up on the outside of your robot or lift them up in the inside of your robot

[K-Dawg157]

Originally Posted by MathFreak

Right, we all will be presenting robots in about 10 days!
I asked that just because I didn't see what kind of team could get a remarkably high score. The field is separated this year and it's a totally different game from the others. The amount of score a robot can get is in a way limited(because of # of totes and those)…

I think that the highest scoring robots are going to be the ones that can move fast enough to complete a stacked tote set in autonomous, because that means that they are efficient and good at what they do.

Pair a robot that can do this with another that can get a noodle and put it on top of the stack, and we could have a high scoring match... very high scoring if the other robot can stack well too.

The highest score an alliance can get is 433. As Calculated in the document.

[Joe Johnson]

I think this year will be a year with more variation than typical. Yes, there will be a lot of elevators and those will certainly share a number of similarities, but after that, the sky's the limit.

There will be Double Stackers and there will be Stack On Stacks Stackers. There will be Landfill Munchers and Loading Station Loiterers.

And that is before we've even started talking Cans. Upright Cans Only Machines will be quite different from Knocked Over Can Machines which will be different from Step Can Grabber Machines.

Then there are noodles? There will be machines that are Noodle-Ignorers and machines that are Noodle-Centric.

Also, lets not forget that some teams will design in mechanisms for knocking over stacks while making it look like an accident for when they need their alliance partners to fall in the rankings. Those are going to be crazy looking rigs ;-) (no, no, no... ...just kidding).

Then there is the whole constrained Transport Configuration vs. virtually unlimited Competition Size. Not since bumpers rules effectively made "The Big Flop" illegal (I'm looking at YOU, Bill Beatty ;-) will we have robots with such imposing wheel bases driving on the Carpet Fields of FIRST.

Then there is the whole crazy (but maybe crazy like a fox) idea of I'm-building-for-Einstein-and-I-don't-care-if-I-rank-dead-last-during-the-qualifiers Strategy (cough, cough, simultaneous 4 can auton grab, cough, cough)*

Bottom line. I think this year will be a better than typical year for robot variety.

I will close with this. I can't/won't share the Overclocked 2015 Robot just yet, but I will say that we've nick named her "Scorpion" and she's worthy of the name.

Cheers,
Dr. Joe J.

*don't be a hater. I haven't let any cats out of any bags. With 1000's of FRC teams do you think your team was the ONLY team that thought long and hard about that idea? I myself stared long and hard into that abyss before shrinking back in horror (the horror, the long spindly, almost certainly rickety horror).

P.S. This is a very tongue in cheek reply. Don't take this too seriously. Lighten up. Really. JJ

[Taylor]

Originally Posted by MathFreak

I asked that just because I didn't see what kind of team could get a remarkably high score. The field is separated this year and it's a totally different game from the others. The amount of score a robot can get is in a way limited(because of # of totes and those)…

What do you consider to be a remarkably high score? We intend to score around 100 points per match. Would that be high, average, or low?

[Sperkowsky]

I agree I feel as if everyone is either using a elevator with acrylic tabs or an elevator with a pheumatic squeezing arm. I think the robots who do great are the ones who are different for instance I saw one bot that is a conveyer belt. I'm still interested in what 254 has done to pick up noodles as that's the one game peice I truly ignored.

[fr05ty27355]

While I do feel that there will be a large number of robots that are very similar this year, I expect we will also see some very out-of-the box designs that could get pretty complex. We still have yet to see much from the top-tier teams, and I'm willing to bet many of them will have some pretty unique designs.

[AllenGregoryIV]

We haven't seen many recycling container bots posted yet.

There are at least a few of us building arms for that purpose.
Video and blog

There are going to be some amazingly unique robots this year. I can't wait to see what some of the historically creative teams come up with. (67, 118, 190, 469, and many others)

[aldaeron]

Personally I am waiting to see the CheesyOctopus: an 8 armed robot that can grab 4 cans from the step and make a stacked tote set and still have one arm for hitting walls.

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Use sensors to collect data about the surrounding environment, then discard it and drive into walls.

During Teleop I imagine said CheesyOctopus will launch no less than 4 tethered quadcopters to gather all the totes from both alliance areas and score over 1000 points.

-matto-

[Squeakypig]

One possibility that people haven't mentioned here is the multi-bot (besides the Octo-254 previously mentioned). It is very possible to have 2 separate devices connect with a tether working together to either double stack or one stacks totes and the other tops off with containers. This sort of design is either going to take the world by storm or crash and burn. No in betweens for that design in my opinion.

[Addison4300]

We are planning to make our robot a hybrid robot with a removable 'claw' to switch between our tote claw and container claw depending on our alliance partners.

[Bwalker]

Team 1448 has a couple tricks up our sleeve, and a pretty ingenious method of changing our robot's dimensions. *cough* *cough*