Designs that would never work...

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by russell

you notice theres a rule that says you cannot use a grabber to rip out wire or hoses. There is another rule that says you may not put something under another robot then lift it up. So what you do is you build a wedge shaped robot that drives under other robots and lifts them up, without actually lifting. Then you have a little probes that plug into their programming port, then you reprogram their robot to drive around autonomously and put your color tetras on all the goals. Its like the borg from startrek. And as far as I can tell its actually legal.

The rules also never explicitly say that I can't park a Boeing 747 right in the middle of the play field and use it as an obstacle for the other alliance. But after a little thought, something tells me that I probably should not do it.

Every now and then, the judicious application of a modicum of common sense can make all the difference in the world.

-dave

[jgannon]

Originally Posted by dlavery

The rules also never explicitly say that I can't park a Boeing 747 right in the middle of the play field and use it as an obstacle for the other alliance.

Oh, come on, Dave... there's no way you're gonna fold that 747 into a 28x38x60 box.

[Anchi]

he he you guys are nuts.

last year my 1st idea was to make a expanding net that cough all the balls when they dropped. i was told it to be imposable, yet surely enuf there was a team that could catch and dispense every last one of them

[robolemur1236]

lets see...

you can have a giant conveyer-belt bot that can load up every last tetra from human and auto stations, then pulls arms out of the ether to drop them on goals

----

a bot that climbs the player station, shoots a zipline to the other side of the field, then traverses that line back and forth to drop tetras?

----

arr, weight limits

[Twstdkittie]

Originally Posted by robolemur1236

lets see...

you can have a giant conveyer-belt bot that can load up every last tetra from human and auto stations, then pulls arms out of the ether to drop them on goals

----

a bot that climbs the player station, shoots a zipline to the other side of the field, then traverses that line back and forth to drop tetras?

----

arr, weight limits

Mm.... zipline... Hehehehe.

[Katie Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Anchi

he he you guys are nuts.

last year my 1st idea was to make a expanding net that cough all the balls when they dropped. i was told it to be imposable, yet surely enuf there was a team that could catch and dispense every last one of them

[Conor Ryan]

Originally Posted by Katie Reynolds

hey we did that exact thing for 1403, and we capped the 2x ball too, not to mention we were good at it. Looking back at it i'm suprised not many teams did because if they put together a scoring matrix, they'd see it was the obvious choice


also another rejected design from this year on our team, you have this inflatable ballon, powered through pneumatics that went into the tetra, and inflated to lift it up.

another one rejected by the team, even though it wasn't as bad as the balloon. You have some muscle wire (it becomes stiff when you put an electrical current through it) and use that to grasp a tetra. It was feasable yet ineffecient because of the current draw it would require.

[Kate00]

We spent one whole meeting designing a robot with a "bowl" that would sit just over the centre tetra, keeping others from capping it. It would be attached to our robot by a string, and we would be able to drive around the goal and ward off other robots. Then we realised that it wouldn't do anything for us if the centre goal wasn't capped first, and it would be boring.

We were going to steal the bowl from the cafeteria.

[greencactus3]

Originally Posted by Anchi

he he you guys are nuts.

last year my 1st idea was to make a expanding net that cough all the balls when they dropped. i was told it to be imposable, yet surely enuf there was a team that could catch and dispense every last one of them

same here. and also there were more than one too.