pic: Shooter damaged a Boulder

[philso]

Originally Posted by Chak

... I wasn't the one putting it in, from from my perspective, we were not vigorously pushing the ball in, nor were we especially gentle. We just put it forward and watched it shoot.
Is that a significant factor in damaging/shooting the Boulder? After all, the robot would be pushing the ball into the shooter with some amount of force anyhow...

It may be that it takes longer for the wheels to grab the ball and shoot it when the ball is pushed forward gently allowing the wheels more time to abrade through the outer coating of the ball. This is just a hypothesis and you would have to specifically test for the difference.

[Ginger Power]

Some new testing with our wheeled shooter for the GreenHorns showed some great results. We started playing basketball with one of our boulders around 3 AM (used the tower for our hoop... hopefully robots will be more accurate than me...)while waiting for the programmers and it got pretty beat up. When they were finally finished we set our robot up in an orientation that it was making 100% of its shots with that beat up ball. Next we introduced an untouched ball to the shooter and it was still successful.

The tests tell me that wheeled shooters aren't terribly affected by wear on the boulder. For reference we were shooting from about 7-10 feet away from the tower.

[waialua359]

We have already tried both a wheeled shooter and catapult prototype design with the option to change certain variables.
Compression on a wheeled shooter seemed optimal at 3" compression. We tested 2" also with poor results. We also used direct drive CIMs on an older AM wheel similar in texture to the stealth wheel.
We didnt even bother trying the plaction wheels because our goal isnt to create a shredder.

Shooters and catapults have already been built by many teams and there are a ton of old video clips from previous seasons.
IMO, building either is the trivial part.