pic: 2015 robot offseason redesign

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by traxxasracr1

This year we focused on the human feeder station (you can see one of our full cycles at 0:52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUsPfgUsUAM), however, with these changes we made, we would like to primarily become a landfill robot while still having the capability of doing human feeder.

The changes we made were all designed ourselves, but inspired by other teams. The intakes for example, we had problems with the totes sliding out when we backed up with a tote, and we wouldn't grab it all the way and it would fall out the front, so we added the second wheel from what we saw on the Killer Bees robot to keep contact with the tote at all times so it doesn't slide out when the robot is moving. Also, we didn't have a way of getting knocked over trash cans with this new bin stabilizer, so we added the pivot on it based on The Cheesy Poofs.

Our main bottleneck this year at the feeder station was lining up to the chute and correcting totes that would fall in sideways, so the hope for this design is to add a third set of wheels above the front wheels to drive the tote in (similar to The Citrus Circuits). Our biggest problem in the landfill was that we had no stabilization of the RC and it would just fall off if we weren't careful, which is the point of the stabilizer.

Awesome! You have a very clear idea of why you made each change and how that's going to affect your ability to play the game. Make sure to give yourself plenty of time for thorough testing, however, because sometimes stuff comes up that you wouldn't expect when you redesign.

5254 went through a similar redesign, and we sped up our elevator so we could stack faster. However, we discovered at Midknight Mayhem that the lexan tabs we used to lift totes ended up taking more powerful impacts with the new speed, and as a result, we dropped a lot of stacks at MidKnight Mayhem. We fixed this for IRI by making the tabs much wider, which worked great most of the time, but occasionally they would catch under the rim of a stack we had just placed, and our driver would have to wiggle the robot to get the stack to place correctly without dropping the can.

I'm not trying to be critical here, because I love that you're putting in this work to improve in the off-season, I just want to make sure you're taking these things into account so you can be successful at your off-season events.