Robots Tipping Over

[Cory]

Originally Posted by squirrel

I make that point over and over again.

I never understand this school of thought. It's somehow a good thing to make a drive base unnecessarily heavy, to the point where one only has 30-40 lbs for a scoring mechanism?

If you can optimize the weight of your drive base, you should. This does not mean you should have a 50 lb base and the remaining 70 lbs 4' off the floor...that's just not smart engineering. What it does mean is that when your scoring mechanism weighs 60 lbs you aren't thinking "Oh ****, how many 1" holes through 0.125" aluminum does it take to remove 20 lbs of weight?", because your robot is 10 lbs underweight. Or it allows you to add more functionality.

2007 is a prime example. How many teams made robots that had top tier scoring capability as well as double 12" ramps? If you made your base as light as possible, you could do both, and do them well. If your base weighed 2/3 of the allotted total, you'd be lucky to do either well.

In short, it seems like poor engineering to me to say that instead of more carefully controlling center of mass due to proper design, we'll just throw 2/3 of the weight onto the base to make sure we don't tip over.