Catapult vs Wheeled Shooter

[sspoldi]

At team 230, we were concerned about the variability of the ball as it impacts either a spinning wheel or linear punching style shooter. In addition, we were inspired by the extremely accurate catapult used by our friends at team 177 in 2014, that was not only accurate, but extremely hard to block.

We got around the lack of adaptability of a traditional catapult by going electric, with 2 mini CIMS and a 28:1 reduction (or something like that). We found we could adapt the command profile to get pretty much any trajectory we wanted. If we went spring or bungee powered it would have been far less adaptable.

We had a lot of people comment that they couldn't believe we could shoot with a fully electric catapult. We did a fair amount of simulation to optimize the gear ratio to maximize energy delivered to the ball. A lot of teams don't do this and as a result don't get the most energy out of their device.

We lean pretty heavily on simulation written in Octave (a MATLAB like language) running on a Linux OS. It's all open source, so if anyone want's some more info please stop by our pit in champs and ask for Henry (or the drive team coach if he's off somewhere).

Cheers,
Steve S.