Resourceful Thinking

[Kevin Sevcik]

For the record, I know we weren't at GLR or CDN, but the Leopards had a mini-bot for 2002. I'm doubting we were the only team, though. At any rate, I don't know that I remember TOO many creative uses of robots at LSR. Lots of teams using big ball arms and stuff to get in the way of robots trying to hang. One robot that decapped a goal. I'm biased, but my favorite match was the last one on Friday. Team 57 was up against a good hanging robot. They had 2 more balls than us and were hanging on the bar already, so we lifted up above them, then lowered ourselves on top of them so they touched, just barely. We had to try a ton of times, and only got them to touch at the last second. I think that was pretty darn good.

[ngreen]

Last year we designed our frame so that we would have plenty of ground clearance for the ramp before we built the ramp. The frame had a 45 degree bevel on the front. After we got the ramp built we realized we had built way to much ground clearance especially with the bevel. If we weren't careful we could climb over boxes. This same bevel ended up saving us from tipping many times. Instead of tipping the bevel would hit flat on the ground and we would upright again because all the weight in the back. I remember one match where we tipped forward onto the bevel going down the ramp and then slid down the whole length of the ramp only on the bevel.

This year are "creative" part was a trash can lid/ shop vac hybrid. Now this thing sucked. They even gave us a creativity award for it and our funny accronym name OSCAR (Our Super Cool Awesome Robot).