Did you notice robots dead on the field?

[Matt Reiland]

Watching the webcasts I saw alot of matches where there were robots dead on the field. Is this from a robot malfunction or was it mainly being turned off by the ref's?

[Joseph F]

I believe this is mainly due to malfunctions or time consuming modifications. We had 2 matches we actually bolted our wheels so the couldnt turn and just set ourselves with our claws facing the goals. Our alliance gave us 1 goal and we held it in the endzone out of the goal scoring zone. We couldn't be moved and won both matches.

we also had a match where our lexan took such a hard shot it hit our RC and we had to get a replacement.

I havn't seen any teams disabled by the judges, mostly things just get bounced loose.

[RebAl]

We thought our robot broke once but we noticed it was disabled and caused by a ball hitting the red button in our station!!!

[Gene F]

In a scrimmage match we had a ball hit the main breaker and disable us. We made some modifications to protect against such things. We also had a robot run into us in a semi finals match and damage their RC on our hitch. In the final match at KSC one of the robots died about 15 sec. into the match. They did a great job of hiding the fact, acting as if they were still driving in the player station. The opponents (our alliance) didn't notice until there were about 30 seconds left. The problem was a low battery. In the haste to make repairs they forgot to change out the battery before the final match. We have assigned two very important people on our team the role of "battery boys".

[fast frank]

hey joe,

i was the driver of the robot you were alied with (271)

that was a nice match, it went perfectly as planed. sorry, when i gave your bot the goal, i kinda came in a little hard and pushed your robot back into the steel diamond barrier. i hopei didn't break anything. good job holding onto that goal!

[Ken Leung]

A couple of times I saw alliances lost in the finals because their robot died out in the field, in an important match that determines if they advance to the next level or not...

This is rather depressing. Teams didn't intentionally damage others to win, but the nature of the competiiton force robots to died in the middle of the field once a while. So now which robot works and doesn't work in matches determines who's the winner and who isn't.

This year, strategies only played so much in the finals, before it ended up raw pushing matches between robots. I saw a couple matches where robots try to win by strategy when they couldn't consistently get two goals, and failed. I wonder if this is really the intention of FIRST when they first designed this game...

And, are those robots not built to be really robust and reliable? I don't think so... There were some very great machines that died outside the on the field for whatever reasons, and for most of the times they worked really well in a matches... I wonder what's the most common reason why teams died out in the field...

[Joseph F]

Don't worry about how hard ya hit us. We wanted you to ram it into us so we would ensure our grabber could reach it. Plus it was kinda funny watching our robot get smashed knowing it was a good thing.

Later on saturday we ran into a goal and broke our RC interface. We'll have to protect it better next year.

[RebAl]

Also our circuit breaker was mounted horizontaly and tripped after a hard hit. - needs to be changed

[David Kelly]

i know the times the technokats (45) were dead on the field, it was because of blown circuit breakers. that stuff can happen when you run 12 motors at once. AWESOME machine!!

[Andy Baker]

Originally posted by David Kelly
i know the times the technokats (45) were dead on the field, it was because of blown circuit breakers. that stuff can happen when you run 12 motors at once. AWESOME machine!!

Well, we didn't run all 12 motors at once, but we did blow the 60A circuit breaker too many times when we were in a tup-of-war situation. This was due to running 6 strong motors in our drive train. Also... our ball collector system has to be off while in a tug-of-war.

There were 3 matches in a row where we either lost power by tripping a breaker or just sucked the voltage out of a battery too quickly. Man... that was tough. It is fixed, though.

Andy B.

[meaubry]

Good point by someone that mention breaker orientation - I can't be sure but it could be possuble that an extremely hard hit could flip the switch if mounted in such a manner. We have ours up and down (like a light switch) with elastic material kinda supporting it in mid air, so it can bounce a litt bit.
Check the current draw or just stall the motors to be sure you won't trip the 60 amp breaker - don't forget to run ALL the motors just in case you are also trying to do other things at the same time (like pick up balls or grab a goal)

[Greg McCoy]

In the final elimination matches it gets even harder to not trip the 60 Amp breaker because the wires are still hot from the last match...Someone told me that Chief Delphi had to not use their ball collector very much because of this...

[meaubry]

The combination of running the drive system and harvester simultaneously while being pinned and slammed into probably caused the circuit breaker to pop, in the match just before it. The motors do get hot when you are picking up balls at the rate we do - but I don't think the plan in the last match called for us to harvest and deposit - not sure cause I didn't get a chance to talk to Joe about it. We hadn't had a single electrical breaker problem during practice at school or on Thursday, Friday during seeding or saturday until that moment - what can I say?

[Mike Norton]

we had a D-ring rip open while dragging goals and robot. then the cable got under or tracks and rip a track right in half. I guess the d-ring held about 900lbs before breaking. we put a bigger d ring on. an a later match snap the cable who would figure. so we double the cable up. the cable was good for over a 1000lbs


when the tracks got rip off we had enough points to still win that match.

[Greg McCoy]

It seems like everything always works perfectly until you need it to. Oh well...hopefully we can get the bugs ironed out before nationals.