Shopping cart wrangler bot?

[Taylor_Ratliff]

For the last 6 months, ive been working at Sam's Club pushing carts with the help of one of those automated cart machines, and let me tell you, THEY SUCK! they break down all the time, water gets inside it, the turning radius is horrible.
The job itsself is absolutely back-breaking, most of the time we were pushing them by hand out in 100F heat (TEXAS!).
I think the idea of an automated cart retriever is excellent, and would make a good theme for a FIRST competition. The robots would have to wrangle scattered carts, line them up, and take them back to the garage area all while avioding obstacles that simulate cars/people.

Another thing is that you cant just push the carts, because if you need to stop they all come apart, you have to have something at the front, so this could easily incorporate teamwork like previous FIRST competitions.

any thoughts, comments?

[Kyle Love]

You may want to move your post to one of the [Official 2006 Game Design] Threads such as this one

[LittleBush]

I don't think that would work out for a robotics competition, shopping carts would be hard to fit in the playing field and it would have been hard to simulate moving vehicles. If you down sized this, it could have made a good vex challenge but probally not a robotics challenge.

[The Cyborg]

I think it would be a pretty interesting game to see, considering I work at a grocery store, and one of the grueling tasks I have to do is push carts (without the assistance of a machine). Making an automated cart pushing machine would be awesome, but then again people would start losing their jobs .

I wonder if grocery stores can host an automated cart pushing competition.... That would be cool!

[Ian Curtis]

I think shopping carts would make excellent game pieces. They store fairly well and you can bring your stuff to the competition in a game piece, and it would be really funny to see the reaction of people driving by the regionals in the north. I mean, there would be 100 people standing outside a sports arena in the freezing cold with shopping carts.