pic: 971's 2008 Robot

[Travis Schuh]

Originally Posted by jgannon

Can you explain how you do, in fact, fit inside the 80" rule? I'm going to make a few assumptions, but it should still pan out. Around the 00:30 mark in the video, you flip your gripper out, and the fabric lands past the far side of the ball. Even if we assume the fabric to be infinitely narrow, it must be at least 78" from the back of your robot. The robot is probably 28" wide plus 3" bumpers on each side. sqrt(78^2 + (34/2)^2) = 79.83". Since the fabric does actually have dimensions... it has to be outside. Am I missing something?

In any case, this is a really creative gripper, and it looks to be performing very well. I hope you guys will be able to use it without being penalized.

It fits in the 80" rule in SolidWorks. The robot is more like 35" by 26" which helps. Also, the front of the chassis is low enough that it fits underneath the ball by a good 4-6". This works out to where the ball and the robot both fit in the 80" rule with enough space for the fabric to go around over the outside of the ball.

The only time we start to run into issues is when we have the arm strait out with the hoop strait out. We never need to go into this playing configuration, so as long as we avoid it we should be fine.

Thanks for the comments.
-Travis