Unusual, potential game pieces

[Wayne TenBrink]

Originally Posted by Richard Wallace

Several years ago someone posted a picture of Dave Lavery holding a ~10 inch long piece of 3" sched 40 PVC pipe, capped at both ends. The thing resembled a giant drug capsule, suitable for medicating a blue whale or some similarly massive fictional creature.

I imagined it half full of pea gravel, to make its center of gravity shift while it is being handled so that manipulation by a robot is more challenging.

I have been hoping for a cylindrical game piece for years. Capped and half filled would be an interesting challenge, but I would prefer to see thin walled, hollow tubes. Length, diameter, material, weight, and quantity TBD. The length-to-diameter ratio should be near 1:1. This would make it feasible to acquire the tube by several methods (grasp OD, skewer the bore, etc.) with no obviously "correct" method. Game pieces could lay on their side or stand on end, and the orientation of the robot to the game piece would affect the way the tube reacted during acquisition. There is a broad range of tasks options to challenge teams with different skills, and few robot mechanism ideas from previous games would be useful. Game piece placement options include: (easiest) move it into a defined scoring zone, (easy) place in bin, (moderate) toss it into a bin that is higher than the robot, (harder) hang it on a pin rack with more points for higher pins, or (harder yet) fit the game piece through a round hole with modest clearance to the tube OD for highest points. Color coded tubes? Different size tubes? Moveable goals? Options galore! Tubes could be cheap and readily available (PVC), robust, visible from the stands, wouldn't require inflation, and would fit thru a door.