pic: 1474 Lift Teaser!

[Yan Wang]

Originally Posted by Leav

yeah, we were thinking about a scissor lift, but we wernt sure because we figured there would be so much wobbling that it would become unusable and might even flip the bot.....

you proved us wrong i guess... it looks really stable!

I don't think that you can tell its stability by looking at the picture. We found last year that our scissor lift was extremely wobbly left and right when we turned fast (but that was OK since we just had to get on top of the platform, align, and shoot up in 1.5sec). I think it will be much harder for this year's scissor lift teams to maintain balance if they want to move quickly. Once you start trying to move fast and turn rapidly to avoid other bots, the scissor lift actually becomes quite wobbly due to the even distribution of weight through it, bottom to top. Once you add a manipulator (or in our case last year, a carabiner "tulip") to the top of it, it becomes even more top heavy. I would really like to see some video of scissor lift robots this year and how well they can move around the field and maintain balance. It's a large field and there are lots of places to get to.