Your Best Robot

[Koko Ed]

OK so we had the debate about what is the best robot ever in FIRST. But for the rest of us mere mortals who are not 71,254,111 or those other great teams what is the best robot (in your opinion) that your own team has put on the field in it's history?

[triggerhappy336]

hm.... maybe... this years?


This isn't a very fun topic for anyone on a rookie team

[Caio]

I'd have to say that this years was the best from team 1510. I was a co-founder so I've seen all its done in the past three years. The first year's robot did become a finalist in the Curie division, and last years did get the xerox creativity award and make it into the FIRST "Behind the design" book, but this years robot was very clean, very professional, and just plain wonderful. It was also the first year we got it powder coated (i was so happy with the bright red xD) Autonomous worked 99.99% of the time, and after a few modifications it was putting on tubes as well as a lot of other teams. We didn't win anything, but i'd have to say based on team members, team commitment, and the product (Red Kiss) this year was definatly the best.

[Koko Ed]

Well in my opinion our best robot was our 2005 robot X-WhAAAt?
One for the obviously reason: It won our one and only regional win ever but there's more to it than just that.

-It opened up a new era of robot building for our team. In the previous 13 years we had decent robots. But in the last three we've had success that we never would have even dreamed of before the 2005 season. And the catalyst was of all things Xerox significantly slashing our budget and causing us to have to go with a much smaller team than in the past. Suddenly we had to streamline our processes and become more efficient at building and lo and behold! Not only did we build a competitive robot but we built a pratice bot as well!

- It has what I consider the coolest feature we have ever built on any robot we had. The arm and particularly the claw, which was instrumantal in the design of this years robot which I think is the second best machine we've ever had.

- The "iconic" name and accompanying cheer that everone seems to remember ( ANNOUNCER:X-WhAAAt? X-CAT: YE-AH! ANNOUNCER: X-WhAAt? X-CATS: OK!). WHen our coach and spirit leader pushed for the name the mentors we're not overjoyed that this weird name was going to represent our robot but Lizzie and Brittany prresented their reasoning for the name and convinced the mentors and the team of it's merits and won them over.
The rest is history.

-The first robot we had that used our trademark "Spirit numbers". Could be a problem next year as Mike didn't put up may FLR pictures at all. So I may have to be clever about it.

[Greg Needel]

in my experience - 2003
overall - 1996

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by triggerhappy336

hm.... maybe... this years?


This isn't a very fun topic for anyone on a rookie team

Well look it as room for improvement.

[lukevanoort]

Hmm, best or most successful? For the latter, ours is our '03 robot, but it was just a box on wheels. Best is this year, by far. This year's robot has a 270 degree turret, really fast and effective pneumatic claw, speedy two stage lift using linear ball bearings, ~180 degree wrist, fast ~160 degree arm, as well as limit switches and pots on all actuations. Looking through our robot 'garage' you won't find any other robot that has one of these features much less all of them

[chaoticprout]

I'm gonna go our 2006 robot, Dori the Punisher, barely pictured in my avatar. Though she couldn't score in the high goal, she was effective as a dumper and she was an amazing defensive bot, which led to our only regional win in LA last year. That day was one of the most fun days of my life.

[Beth Sweet]

Well, having been on 2 very different teams (67 & 1504) I have 2 very different answers.

Best in terms of most successful? HOT, 2004, the year I graduated. That machine could do anything, and until the cord was smashed into with the robot 6 feet in the air, it was unbreakable. That machine was amazing.

In terms of most fun, I'd have to say Herbie, aka the Little Robot that Could, 1504's 2006 robot. That thing would go out and score 30-40 points and because it wasn't shooting them up in the air, no one would have any idea. So the other alliance would think they'd won the match, and then the score would come up and we had won by like, 20. The looks on some of their faces were hilarious.

[Richard Wallace]

2007 was our best robot so far. At both of our regionals (St. Louis and Boilermaker) we seeded well enough to be or become an alliance captain, then accepted an invitation from a higher-seeded A.C. Our scoring was the best we've achieved so far, and our reliability was excellent -- only one relatively minor breakdown, easily fixed. Twice a regional semifinalist. We've made it that far before, but this year we felt like we contributed more to our alliances' wins. Now that we've started to taste success on the field, we will be hungry for more of it next year.

And our 2007 team performance was even better, yielding the second regional CA in our six-year history.

[LordTalps]

Would have to be this year's robot. Only our second year, we seeded well enough to be the 7th ranked alliance at the Las Vegas regional. Our robot was liked enough to be chosen to an alliance by both 116 and 233 at regional competitions. Then we played great at the World Championships, was quite happy with our improvements over last year (though last year our robot took us to the World Rookie All-Star award, so it wasn't too bad either ).

[s_forbes]

I would definately say that team 1726's robot this year was far better than our rookie bot from last year. It wasn't as successful, but much more engineering went into it and it performed much better. Also, this year's robot has a killer drive train; I can't think of any ways to improve it!

[Brandon Holley]

for MORT:

'04 - Palmetto Regional Champion - Beast of a drivetrain combined with excellent driving and strategy
'05 - Innovative drivetrain and wedge design, effective capping ability, agile


for the NUTRONs:

'01 - National Champion - 1st overall pick...enough said
'07- Boston Regional Champion - Dominant capper - 3rd highest tube avg in archimedes (behind 254 and 233)

[techtiger1]

I think I have to say that our 2007 robot is our best robot yet as much as I like our 05 as well. The 2007 robot has one silver and one gold to it's credit (palmetto and Florida regionals) and 2 design awards one motorola qualtity and one Gm industrial design award. The 2007 was by far our most competitive at championship so far.

-Drew

[Lil' Lavery]

I'm a little bit torn, because our 2007 bot definitely wasn't the hardest of our robots to build (it was probably the easiest in my tenure aside of 2006), but that simplicity made it by far the most effective.

In our 12 year history, this bot became only our third alliance captain, and fourth alliance era elimination competitor. It also became our first bot to be selected in the first round (twice, although we declined at VCU), and our first to make the elimination at Championship during the alliance era. Our 2006 autonomous may have been more reliable, but this was certainly a much harder challenge than a corner dump, and certainly a lot more fun to watch, and we still managed to score six keepers. Our team has had a history of being in high scoring matches in recent years (sometimes on the wrong side), and ED v. 8.0 kept that tradition, putting up the high scores at both VCU (108) and Galileo (271). It was one of the few times we've been a real target of defense (our previous best bot was in 2001, where there was no defense), and aside of a couple excellent defenders (122 and 703 namely) we managed to cope very well. I still remember a match at championship where we got a tube stuck on our flag and our chain came off (and wedged itself between our sprocket and frame, totally immobilizing that half the drive).....and they still had a defender on us the entire time. It was the first time we had people coming up to tell us they expected us to win the regional (sadly we didn't...and sadly that attention may have been our downfall).

ED v. 8.0 was engineered better than most of our bots, and accomplished tasks with simplicity and elegance. While it didn't have our 2003-2004 custom 2-speeds, it did use an AndyMark shifters, each with 2 small CIMs. It had a 6WD, using 6" AM Performance wheels, with nitrile roughtop tread (much more durable than our rubber wedgetop that we used last year), and approximate speeds of ~10fps and ~4fps. It also was capable of climbing every ramp we attempted.

We once again used our award-winning modular control box design developed in the summer of 2004, but added new features (including a LCD display for basic diagnostics and autonomous play selection/parameters).

Our arm had only 2 points of rotation, at the shoulder and wrist. The shoulder was powered by two globe motors at a speed fast enough we decided to reduce it in our controls (but with more than adequate torque). Both our pinching gripper and wrist were actuated by pneumatics, and rotated around the same point. The arm had a single-time telescoping extension (powered by surgical tubing) that would fire at the beginning of the match then latch in the extended position, allowing for us to pick up off the ground, start with a keeper in our grasp, and score on all three levels.

Our autonomous was dead reckoning for all of VCU, and for our first few matches at Championship, but when we got our camera fully operational, it jumped in accuracy greatly (2x as many hits in <1/3 the attempts). Our autonomous was guided mainly by our camera and gyro (and the potentiometer on our arm), and once we had the camera operational, we were one of the most reliable auto team on Galileo.

It was also one of our most robust and reliable machines, experiencing very few failures of any kind during the season (and none we couldn't fix).

We also had a lift system that functioned, but never made it onto the robot (due to some issues with figuring out how to have both the platforms and start with a keeper, among other issues).
2007 was a good year for 116 in many regards, and this robot was our best.

Pics:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/185/4...e904f4.jpg?v=0