How would you have built your team's robot differently if the robot could expand?

[Molten]

I wouldn't. It would be too dangerous to reach out, even if you were aloud. That is why the rules were in place, so we wouldn't end up with a bunch of broken bots. That rule wasn't there to constrain, it was there to protect. One of the better rules for this year, if you ask me.

[BradMello]

A trebuchet scoring device

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by BradMello

A trebuchet scoring device

Did that

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/32412

[BradMello]

Originally Posted by Pikat

Did that

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/32412

oh my god...
roffle

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by BradMello

oh my god...
roffle

It was origionally built to launch baseballs. More info about it here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/32122

There’s a link to a video somewhere in the thread. It’s scary.

[NorviewsVeteran]

GAAA 20-20 Hindsight!

[bobwrit]

Easy, have a basket just about the maximum starting config, Place a hinge on the upper forward edge along with a CIM, And have a dumper.

[BJT]

After watching some of the really good dumpers I'm not sure relaxing the rules would result in robots that worked any better.

[Ice Berg]

Initially I really disliked the fact that we couldn't leave dimensions, but looking back, its definitely an important thing to be able to design to. Something we decided at the end of last season was that we would try to keep our robots from extending past the drive base as much as possible. This really cuts down on damages. In the end I don't think I would change anything. This does not apply to all years, but I think that this year, not being able to leave dimensions was really not that much of a problem.

[nahstobor]

More lucky Clamps! We had this one lucky racing clamp on our robot for the New Jersey and VCU regional, but it seems it ran out when we got to Atlanta.

Honestly I wouldn't change anything about the 612 robot, just strategy. I wish we started human loading more before Saturday in Atlanta. Also I wish we wrote a Automode to human load rather than trying to fix our tracking Auto which broke after New Jersey, we tried in our last match but the turning value was off by a half a second but we were just guessing numbers before we did it.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Molten

I wouldn't. It would be too dangerous to reach out, even if you were aloud. That is why the rules were in place, so we wouldn't end up with a bunch of broken bots. That rule wasn't there to constrain, it was there to protect. One of the better rules for this year, if you ask me.

I personally agree, I've just heard a lot of talk about the "expand to any size" rule's omission stifling creativity and whatnot, so it'd be cool to see all the interesting designs.

[MrForbes]

We might have added some "wings" to pop out at the sides of the front to help collect balls, to funnel them into the harvester from a wider area. I can't really think of anything else.

[Adama]

We had discussed going with a near replica of Spikes robot from 2006 and then we realized we couldn't expand anyway and we'd probably score on ourselves

[Herodotus]

You would definitely have seen people covering the trailers, which would have killed the game. If, however, we assume they only allow you to expand forward and to the side (I.E. no expanding backwards over your own trailer) you probably would have seen very similar designs but that incorporated deployable chutes to extend directly over the opponents trailer and deployable arms to better collect balls. I don't see why anyone would be worried about breaking things. We've never had big issues with it, once we designed properly.

[Lil' Lavery]

Assuming covering trailers and interlocking between bars (think 2002) was still illegal.

"Arms" (for lack of a better word) to help contain opposing trailers.
An expandable hopper intentionally designed to collect balls that "overshot" our trailer.