Resourceful Thinking

[Billfred]

I've gotta say, the Firebirds (aka 433) probably used their arm for about a billion different things at Palmetto. High-centering? A smidge. But it was mind-blowingly effective.

Our robot, when we built it, was supposed to handle the 2X ball on the mobile goals and do some light herding. Boy, did that not work right. Sure, we uncapped--but then we'd lose our grip on the sucker, and we'd be stuck. So we ditched the arm altogether and ran with the base. It actually was pretty good at defense, helping us defeat 1319 (at that point the #1 seed, and still finished #8), and leading to our brief proclamation that 1293 was "armless, not harmless." (That was squashed pretty well with a defeat in our final qualifier.)

We came, we saw, we learned. I shudder to think what we'll have in 2005. (A sponsor, perhaps.)

By the way, since the FIRST website doesn't have anything before Stack Attack, can someone point me to some archived rules? I'd love to find out what Maize Craze was back in 1992.

[Jake177]

That sounds almost exactly like what we did at the New England Regional. Fortunately we still had our small ball system.
Our website has a fairly good description of each year's game. I hope it can satisfy your curiosity. Just click on "history."

[RoteAugen]

one thing that surprised my team at the BAE regional is what our CG allows us to do. by tradition, we always use 7-8" wheels which do not allow us to climb the 6" step. However, this year we found out that with our extremely low CG (roughly 6" off the ground) we are at least able to casually drive off of the 6" step . this is very confusing to the casual observer due to the fact that we have a robot that fills a good portion of the dimensions that we are allowed. However, about 90% of our total weight resides in the base part of the bot.

[Phil_Lutz]

In a qualifying match (our second i think), our bot fought to get hooked on the bar. Once on, we started the winch. One of the other alliance bot's (330) was already hanging and unfortunitly directly above us. Our winch operator didn't stop the winch once we were off the ground, so the winch kept lifting.
About 5 seconds later and after hoasting 250 lbs., we inadvertantly removed the other team from the bar.

Our bot also features a four-bar lift to use in un-capping and re-capping the goals.

In one of quarter final matches, we were hanging, the other alliance was attempting to "hook" on the bar.
They positioned themselves and were about to drop the hook, when we raised the four-bar effectively blocking their arm from attaching to the bar.

We won that match 75 to 25.

Phil

[westfalia]

With last year's robot, we initially designed a long arm that would allow us to stack bins and push them and knock over stacks all with the same mechanism. But we soon found out that it was way to huge and gave us a sickening tendency to tip over. So... We took out all of the arm except the bottom most part, allowing us to have a moving arm perfectly capable for knocking over stacks. It worked great along with some capable drivers! Another benefit it had: if a few rounds we tipped over as a result of some hard pushing... But our handy arm could reright us onto our wheels every time.

This year we use a telescoping arm that extends 11 feet upwards, that allows us to hang from the floor. Fortunately, it does exactly what we designed it to, and doesn't make us tip. But, as an added benefit, once again, if we ever tip over, it can reright us. My being the arm operator these past two years and also being one of the arm designers has been a trip- lots of surprises!