How many teams made 2 robots

[the_short1]

team 1596, made 2 robots,, our first one was FIRST legal, then we decided to make a second one so we would have a practice bot for driving and stuff, and taht way our finished product would look better (more pratice, better ideas by then..) so we just took first legal parts off the first bot and put on second,....

was a little more expensive.. especially for a ROOKIE team, but we took the challenge and i think it paid off because we were able to select 2 drive teams outa our team thru a week of testing, we now only use the #1 team, unless one member is gone, due to a incident at great lakes regional concerning 'red-bull' and one of our second set of drivers being a little too 'wreckless' because of it ..


.. . so how many other teams out ther have 2 bots?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Our team built 2 different robots during the build. (kinda) A majority of the team worked on our new drive base and arm. An engineer and a few students worked on a modular pneumatic arm system, which was bolted on to last year's bot, which we were planning to donate to another team in case their's fails.

[KathieK]

This is an interesting question that was debated here due to the <R14> rule.

[Lisa Rodriguez]

RAGE has 2 robots, the competition and a practice robot, built almost simlutaneously(during the build cycle) and, as within the rules, no changes or improvements are made to the 2nd bot and are then brought to compeition, it's used for driver practice, so we have an experienced drive team that knows how to handle the robot in all situations....



offtopic...post 237 smelly el!
/offtopic

[Jeff Waegelin]

We built two robots, and almost enough spare parts for a third. We definitely haven't used any of the spare parts, but the spare robot has been a lifesaver. It's great for practice driving, and when we had mechanical issues at GLR, it gave us something we could use to work out those issues between competitions, and then replicate our fixes at the competition.

[Billfred]

1293 built two robots, Ockham and Hockham.

Ockham is the one you'll see at Palmetto--the one that Bharat declared was "some sexy use of aluminum" in that link.

Hockham is similar in that it's a kitbot with some of the same structures, but with only one arm segment that'll raise. (In that respect, he's similar to Bob from last year, but with a better drivetrain and a more robust arm.)

The other night, one of our freshman capped one of the office chairs in our classroom with a tetra, then she tried to lift the tetra off. Hockham's arm held up the tetra and the chair before the belt slipped from its zip-tie attachment method. Quite fun.

[Bcahn836]

We built 2 robots, the first one we built was the kit bot, to check out the transmissions and the strength of the kit bot itself. We decided not to use the kit bot frame but use the transmissions so we used the kit bot to test different wheel combinations and also driver training. The second robot was our competition robot. And we used a third robot, our 2004 robot, for programming testing, which we had to put back together.

[stealth13777]

Great for the teams that can even afford to make a second robot. I think its a great way to get in practice; we could have performed a lot better with more practice. The problem is budget. Us and many other teams simply do not have enough money for that. How a first year team had the budget to make two I don't know, but it makes for a promisisng future. This year we worked a pizza stand to add up enough money for a second regional to basically use as practice (although we hoped to do well and be in contention). Im curious to know how a first year team came up with the money.

[Koko Ed]

We built to robots.
Our competition robotX-WhAAAt!!! and our practice robot X-Wha-?.

[MattB703]

I think that our team has a fairly generous budget. We could easily buy all of the materials and components that it would take to make a second robot without getting a complaint from our generous sponsor. (thanks Delphi) So why did we choose to make only one robot this year? Because of the human resource cost. If you are a team that manufactures the majority of the robot, be very careful that you do not bite off more than you can chew and end up with less robot to compete with because you tried to make 2 robots.

Also, unless you are a rookie team, a lot of benefit can be had by your drivers practicing with a previous years robot.

[Ethulin]

I just can not see how teams can do this!

Well there is the money, but also the time!

First, money... we would all love to have more, but my team some how manages to get almost nill.

We spend all (sometimes over) all our money on the robot and entrance fees. We have no money to pay students way to competitions etc.

Second, time. I guess the way I see it, spend all your time making a REALLY good robot not two pretty good ones.

Also, as soon as we do finish, which is usually about a week or two early, we spend all our time working on other things, such as our scouting, and of course the drivers are practicing.

[Pin Man]

hahahahahah TWO ROBOTS?!!??!?! We have enough trouble making one robot and having it work properly let alone two... I'd say not many...

[Katy]

We made a second robot after the ship and before competition. It was wonderful for driving but actually it was what did us in eventually.

1) We lightened it. Our wheel mounts held up wonderfully on the practice robot and taught our driver to not be afraid to hit the controls. Then we got to competition and high acceleration bent the lightened mounts very badly

2) We painted it. The wheels on our robot can slide backwards about 2 inches for chain tensioning. The bolts hold the wheel in place with friction but on the painted frame the bolts slid.

So yeah...lessoned learned...test under actual conditions.
I hate it when common sense is right. It gets in the way of the math.

[mathking]

We used last year's control board (since last year's robot suffered a mortal wound at a demonstration at Ohio State late last spring) and built a "JV" robot this year. We had a large increase in the number of participants (from 28 to 50) and there would have been too many people for everyone to get a lot chances to do the actual work in building a robot. There would have been a lot of people standing around watching at any given time.

So after the design week, we had a group of the newer students start work on the second robot. They still worked on the main robot at times, but their principal work was on a second robot. We didn't design this robot to be able to compete in the competition per se (since we were using the old drill motors it would not have been legal) but rather as a learning experience and to have a demonstration robot. It has actually travelled out to elementary and middle schools to build support for the FLL program and has been out in the community for fundraisers.

One idea we followed this year was that the new members working on the second robot were mentored by the more experienced high school team members rather than our OSU engineering mentors. If you have an old pair of control boards, building a second robot does not have to be that expensive. We did buy a second chassis from IFI to use on it, but that was to test a couple of configuration ideas. We could have built the chassis out of scraps and spare parts. With buying the chassis we spent a total of $241.38 on "Minibot." (This includes the removable seat on castors it can pull, allowing it to be the Minibot Human Transporter.)

[Hershko]

Team 1577 from Raanana, Israel built 2 Robots during the 6 weeks building time one for them selves and one for other rookie team from Israel that do not have any help and mentors. 1577 did it also with out any help from outside high school mentors. They won the rookie all star for that and will come to the championship in Atlanta.