Conveyor Belt

[cgredalertcc]

In 06' 1741 used actual conveyor belting to pick up the poof balls and it worked wonderfully. The only problem was that it captured the balls so well one of our team members would usually have to help the field reset crew remove them. In the off season 06'-07' we modified the conveyor system to use industrial flat rubber bands and that worked just as effectively, but allowed us to cut our robot weight by nearly 10 pounds and sped up the pick up a great deal. The pickup was driven by both FP motors with the gear box. I would highly suggest a conveyor this year simply because it takes up less space than a screw type lift and it has the capability of picking up 2 balls at a time. Whereas, in other lifts you are limited to only one ball at a time. Also an interesting observation on the bands. The rollers at each end of the conveyor were made out of 3" PVC pipe with a cap on each end and rings of larger PVC glued in place to create ridges and valleys, our intent being for the bands to ride in the valleys, but they did the exact opposite. The bands tracked to the high points and stayed there quite nicely.