arm design

[ngreen]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schuetze

To be able to use the metered exhaust will likely require a human touch that an auto program cannot handle consistantly.

I agree with you generally. But it also depends greatly on a the complexity of your movements. In most cases using pneumatics that stop midstroke are similiar to dead reckoning programming. With adjustments and fine tuning you can get good results for simple, broad movements. But for complex, precise movement you are generally out of luck.

An example of this was my teams 2003 robot. We had two cyclinder lifting our stacker. As part of our autonomous we would lift our stacker part way up. It came to the same position almost everytime. But it wouldn't work well it if had to be precise.

This is where some design comes in. IF you design a robot that is able to pick up tetras with broad movements, you would likely be able to tune a program to do it in automounous (thinking about things like air pressure, piston speed, what the tetra weight will do). If it must be precise in it's movements (move two inches, then one inche, and so on) it will likely be hard for autonomous and equally so for the driver's and any programming in user mode.