What to do with old robots?

[tkwetzel]

It might be a lot of fun to bring out the old bots to play this years game...at an off-season cometition. Maybe someone will start an off-season competition where you have to use an old robot to compete. It would be really interesting to see how well those bots could play the new games, cause there would be robots from several different years, so they would all be designed to do different things. The best would be if a previous robot could hang on this years bar (without any modifications).

[Jeff Waegelin]

We disassembled our 1998 and 1999 robots at the end of the 2001 season, when we had to pack up all our stuff and move out of our shop for a year. They were non-functional, and just taking up space that we didn't really have available. It would have been nice to keep them for old time's sake, but we really had nowhere to put them. Amusingly, we saved all the parts, and ended up using quite a few of them on our 2002 OCCRA robot, and a couple on our 2003 FIRST robot.

All our robots from 2000 and later are in storage in our shop. We still pull them out for demos and testing a couple times a year. It's a really nice thing to have 5 functional and very different robots available for testing. And, we've found that some of our older robots make better demo machines than others. I think our 2002 'bot has done more demos than any other robot in our team's history. It's small, sleek, and just looks cool Plus, it doesn't have the tendency to attempt to kill people like our 2001 'bot... not that that's ever happened or anything...

[spears312]

we keep ours at our school in our resource class room. I know this last season we found an old bot that we wanted to use as a model and refrence for our new robot and took it out to where we build.

[OneAngryDaisy]

All of our robots' (tom, hephty, daisy I, daisy II, daisy III) drivetrains are intact and working, we use them for demonstrations and mini competitions, but most of their extremities are either non functioning, taken off, or programmed out so that people dont whack eachother in their noggins.

As a matter of fact, we used our first robot as a reference for this years' bot (transferred its ladder mechanism to our 12' telescoping arm), so its topless. Most of our robots are female tho, so I wouldn't advise calling them topless, but...

[Koko Ed]

Put them in what was once known as the PAW room and call it the X-Cat's museum.

[Barry Bonzack]

I don't want to make this sound like I want another school's bot donated to my team, but if other teams have no use for other bots, and are dismantling them, taking them apart, and selling them for scrap anyway (or chunking them with a pumpkin launcher) what about finding a rookie team in the near-by area that does not have any old robots of their own to practice with? They most likely will have extra space, and would love to see what a great bot would look like after the 6 weeks. At least the donating team will know their robot they worked so hard on is still in one piece, and they can have the satisfaction of helping a rookie team...Just an idea.

[Bcahn836]

Great Idea!!!

[KenWittlief]

Ive found its really hard to get any meaningfull pratice with last years, or a previous years robot

for one thing, they often have a very short 'mean-time between failure' rate - you drive it for 10 minutes then spend an hour fixing something

it would be better to take the RC and build a simple practice bot - something with a basic 2 wheel drivetrain and simple frame, that will run on one battery for an hour or more, and wont load up the motors so they cook in 4 minutes.

search on 'practice' and maybe 'frank' and the one we made this year should show up in here somewhere, with photos

[FusionDude364]

We have five robots, or have made 5, a few havent quite made it. We have taken 2 completely apart, used the parts for prototypes and other stuff. We've won regionals with 2 of them, so they wont be taken apart. They sit in our technology classroom and we use them for when we go places to show what we do, and we use them for practice and testing during build time. All 3 of the old robots we have still work fine and we dont ever have a problem with them breaking on us.

[Jeff Waegelin]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Ive found its really hard to get any meaningfull pratice with last years, or a previous years robot

for one thing, they often have a very short 'mean-time between failure' rate - you drive it for 10 minutes then spend an hour fixing something

it would be better to take the RC and build a simple practice bot - something with a basic 2 wheel drivetrain and simple frame, that will run on one battery for an hour or more, and wont load up the motors so they cook in 4 minutes.

search on 'practice' and maybe 'frank' and the one we made this year should show up in here somewhere, with photos

That's interesting. We still run our 2002 robot for practice, and we've only had one problem (old firmware on the controller that didn't like autonomous mode) in all the time we've used it for testing. That robot just doesn't quit. We've run it through 4 competitions in 2002, several weeks of autonomous testing in 2003, and countless demos at local schools all without a hitch. It's probably the most solid, reliable machine we've ever built. I guess it all depends on the robot, and how reliable and robustly it was built.

[Joe J.]

Out of the five robots our team has had (2 from 465 3 from 862) we only have two that still run. Both the 2000 robot and 2001 robot have been stripped down to their welded frames and those are sitting on top of our storage unit at Visteon. The 2002 robot is basicly a driving frame and is sitting in our teacher class room so we drive it around the hallways.The 2003 robot is completly dissasembled. And the 2004 bot is on display at Visteon.

[Joe Matt]

We have 1.0-5.0 sitting on the 2003 king of the hill parts in our lab. All of them run to a degree, expect 3.0. The frame of 3.0 has warped too much. Also, we are trying to get 1.0 up and running better. We used 2.0 this year for practace for the arm/driver cordanation. 4.0 made quite a few appearences, such as with Gov. Warner & at a local Chick-fil-a. 5.0 has made an appearence at a local elementary school, and mabey a hospital soon.

[Bernie]

at MOE we use three of our bots, including this year's, for demonstrations to promote FIRST, we take them to the several schools that we have students in and at events we hold. we also visit various science or academic events to show them. two of the older bots have been dissembled though, they were too big for demonstration.

we do use them for driving practice and for ideas, but their main purpose for being around is to expand FIRST.

[Bcahn836]

Today I started taking apart our first robot from 2002. I am putting the componets from the robot and putting them into one of those blue rubber maid containers from the 2003 game. And labeling the box "SPARE PARTS". And all scrap metal is being recycled. This years robot is going to be used for demo, and off season competitions.
One robot down two to go. LOL

[nparikh]

Well, our team, 25, has been involved with F.I.R.S.T. for many years. We have a lot of old robots and we keep them in a store-room in our school, that is dedicated for the use of our team. We still take out the robots every so often to play with them, practice driving, and keep them in shape...