Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017

[cadandcookies]

Prototype document is up!

You can find it with the rest of our white papers here.

[apm4242]

Have you guys posted your reveal video yet? As of 1/14, I can't seem to find it.

[ehochstein]

Originally Posted by apm4242

Have you guys posted your reveal video yet? As of 1/14, I can't seem to find it.

Not yet but I do know that they are working on it!

[cadandcookies]

Our robot reveal video is up!

You can check it out here.

You can also check out our white papers here.

Those papers include a description of our strategic analysis of FIRST Steamworks, what our prototyping process looks like, some thoughts from our programmer, and a guide to how to do powder coating in-house like we do.

Without further ado... we present Lelantos.

[Cothron Theiss]

As gorgeous as that robot looks plastered all across my computer screen, this might help.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Cothron Theiss

As gorgeous as that robot looks plastered all across my computer screen, this might help.

Beat you to it. Sometimes I forget to preview my posts...

[cd_ssb]

Awesome reveal video! Definetly my favorite from the 2017 season! I wish you guys would've shown your robot shooting a bunch of balls all at oncr, instead of just one or two at a time. Im curious to see how accurate your shooter really is. What percent of balls do you guys when you storage is "full"?

[cd_ssb]

Originally Posted by cd_ssb

Awesome reveal video! Definetly my favorite from the 2017 season! I wish you guys would've shown your robot shooting a bunch of balls all at oncr, instead of just one or two at a time. Im curious to see how accurate your shooter really is. What percent of balls do you guys when you storage is "full"?

Pardon the spelling errors, im on mobile. That last sentance is supposed to say what percent of balls do you SCORE when your sotrage is "full"?

[fr05ty27355]

Originally Posted by cd_ssb

Pardon the spelling errors, im on mobile. That last sentance is supposed to say what percent of balls do you SCORE when your sotrage is "full"?

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

Our hopper to shooter transition is very inconsistent. I would say that our shooter, by itself, is quite accurate (when testing hand fed, we had an extremely consistent shot), but unfortunately the shooter is only half of the battle. Loading is paramount, and we unfortunately neglected the design of our loading mechanism, having only three days.

I would say that we were probably 60% accurate, maybe more, when we were able to shoot. Unfortunately jams or mispositioned balls made that rarer than any of us would have liked. This also made it somewhat difficult to actually gauge how accurate our shot was.

To expand on what Nick stated, we currently don't have any feedback on the shooter. Adding a feedback mechanism (such as an optical encoder), and implementing a basic closed-loop control (PID loop anyone?) could vastly improve the accuracy. Given only 3 days and a limited budget, we typically don't worry about these nitty-gritty details.

The hopper could additionally use a "blending" mechanism to shuffle balls so that they find their way into the shooter (many of the other Ri3D teams implemented such mechanisms). Our hopper was finalized on the last day, and we did not have ample time to construct/install such a mechanism.

[D.Allred]

Interesting design and a great looking robot.

The intake climber is a very interesting idea. Do you believe it would actually work on the real field? You are using a small rope on a small roller. It looks like you would jam the roller against the davit channel before you could consistently move the pressure plate. I've noticed a lot of these Ri3D designs don't seem to consider the channel.

David

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by D.Allred

Interesting design and a great looking robot.

The intake climber is a very interesting idea. Do you believe it would actually work on the real field? You are using a small rope on a small roller. It looks like you would jam the roller against the davit channel before you could consistently move the pressure plate. I've noticed a lot of these Ri3D designs don't seem to consider the channel.

David

Correct, we designed our climber without knowledge of the channel.

I'm pretty confident that an enterprising team could modify the concept to be competition-ready. We did have a small amount of room to work with on the final robot that could feasibly fit the modifications necessary.

[Purpose]

Beautiful bot and extremely impressive all around. Thank you for all your time and dedication!

May I ask what motor and gear reduction you used for your intake/climber? You're using a CIM correct? I was really impressed with how fast the lift pulled your bot.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Purpose

Beautiful bot and extremely impressive all around. Thank you for all your time and dedication!

May I ask what motor and gear reduction you used for your intake/climber? You're using a CIM correct? I was really impressed with how fast the lift pulled your bot.

Glad you liked our robot! We really wanted to push ourselves to raise the bar on Ri3D this year. I leave whether we succeeded in that up to the community

I did answer the same question earlier in this thread, if you'd like more details than that, let me know!

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

The gearbox powering our intake/climber is an AM Sonic Shifter with a 14.8:1 low gear and a 3.7:1 high gear. There are two CIM motors powering it. It's a little bit slow as an intake on high gear, but is quite sufficient in low gear for our climb.

[Purpose]

My mistake, thanks for the info!

I would say you definitely succeeded on that front; this is only the second year I've kept up with RI3D, but your bot is probably the most impressive RI3D I've seen. I can easily imagine your bot winning a regional or district event and contending in World's (theoretically of course ).

Before I saw your reveal, I was pretty content with my team's progress, but now I'm anxious to make changes to our gear manipulator so it's perfect, and modify our climber so it climbs faster. I guess that's kinda the point of RI3D huh? To make us push our teams to the extent of their capabilities. So thanks for that! Haha

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by cd_ssb

Awesome reveal video! Definetly my favorite from the 2017 season! I wish you guys would've shown your robot shooting a bunch of balls all at oncr, instead of just one or two at a time. Im curious to see how accurate your shooter really is. What percent of balls do you guys when you storage is "full"?

Our hopper to shooter transition is very inconsistent. I would say that our shooter, by itself, is quite accurate (when testing hand fed, we had an extremely consistent shot), but unfortunately the shooter is only half of the battle. Loading is paramount, and we unfortunately neglected the design of our loading mechanism, having only three days.

I would say that we were probably 60% accurate, maybe more, when we were able to shoot. Unfortunately jams or mispositioned balls made that rarer than any of us would have liked. This also made it somewhat difficult to actually gauge how accurate our shot was.