Game Piece Friction Simulation

[david.e.boles]

Building the game pieces to test with out of wood is significantly easier and probably cheaper than the steel and plastic used in a lot of the competition field. Unfortunately a lot of the game involves ramps and obstacles where the frictional coefficient of the material could be important. Do you guys have any ideas on what could be used as a coating to simulate that?

[GreyingJay]

Well the ramps are made of polycarbonate I believe according to my quick read of the field drawings. So my team was just going to build the wooden ramps as per the team field drawings and buy a (very) think sheet to place over top of the inbound ramp surface.

Depending on the fidelity of the sally door and drawbridge we may just buy enough material to build the door surface out of the required material rather than use the spec'd plywood.

[Chris is me]

This has been concerning to me too. In 2012, lots of teams built robots to cross over the team version of the bump in the field, which was made of wood. When they went to try on the metal version, it was much tougher to cross. Seeing the similarities between the 2012 bump and the Rock Wall, I suspect this may be a problem once more unfortunately.

I don't think there's an easy solution for a spray or coating to make these materials behave like the (painted?) aluminum of the field.

[rich2202]

I was thinking about using metal air ducts to cover pieces that are supposed to be steel.