stationary robot

[mdituri]

We actually designed a conveyor with a robot on a rail system whose goal was to take all 30 totes from the human player and stack them in stacks of five or six, whatever our alliance partners needed. The conveyor would deliver the stacks to the robot, with a vertical lift. The robot would be perpendicular to the conveyor. We would only be on the right hand side of the field (relative to the player station).

After much discussion with many many teams and coaches, we decided that although this design is cool and outside of the box, we would be hard pressed to find the ideal partners until at least MAR champs, but likely worlds. There would of course be an alliance that would find a team who quickly makes 5 stacks of six from the human player, but the downside of not moving during auto or being able to do the cans unless someone fed them to us was concerning. Our feeling was we would rank low during qualifiers and never be doing the picking. We couldn't leave it up to chance.

If we had a larger team, we actually considered spending $5K and putting a group of students on it with two engineers and building it to compete in MAR. It would just take a considerable amount of machining time and we would have to make that team work from 1 am to 5 am.