What was the most innovative feature this year?

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Posted by bill whitley at 05/21/2001 6:59 PM EST


Student on team #70, Auto City Bandits, from Powers Catholic High School and Kettering University.



What were some of the most innovative systems you saw this year?

Best drive?
Best arm?
.. grabber?
wheels?
control system?

Were the most innovative systems also the best?

Bill, who tries his best to keep the Tech forum alive

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Posted by Mimi Brown at 05/21/2001 10:14 PM EST


Student on team #128, The Botcats, from Grandview Heights High School.


In Reply to: What was the most innovative feature this year?
Posted by bill whitley on 05/21/2001 6:59 PM EST:



Team 75 had a really cool drive system...if you got to see their wheel set up, it was impressive. Unfortunatly, i never got to see them in action.

~Mimi
Team 128

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Posted by Gui Cavalcanti at 05/21/2001 10:28 PM EST


Student on team #422, Mech Tech, from Governor's School (GSGIS) and Verizon.


In Reply to: What was the most innovative feature this year?
Posted by bill whitley on 05/21/2001 6:59 PM EST:



I don't know what team had this, but they were in Galileo. They had a cool latched drive train with 6 wheels; all I saw them do was go under the bar, but when they did they had a really cool system; their first two wheels would hit the bar, and retract in the chassis, leaving the robot on 4 wheels. It would continue over, and then the two fore wheels would come back down. The middle wheels would hit, latch up, and afterwards come back down, and same for the back. Finally it would get to the other side in record time. I thought it was pretty ingenious in design.

-Gui

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Posted by Scott England at 05/21/2001 10:46 PM EST


College Student on team #401, The Hokie G.U.A.R.D, from Virginia Tech/MCPS and Virginia Tech/VBEP.


In Reply to: What was the most innovative feature this year?
Posted by bill whitley on 05/21/2001 6:59 PM EST:



well, once again I'm not an English major, so I'm not sure if these fit the proper definition of 'innovative', but these are a few mechanisms that I got a close look at and thought they pretty darn cool.
For drive motors, without a doubt team 45
I still don't understand how that double motor thing works, but it sounded brilliant and I'd like to know whoever came up with that idea
for drive wheels, i think most people would agree the prize goes to team 47, with those rotating drive wheels, I didn't get to see chief delphi's bot last year - '00 were the rotating wheels included that year too?
for telescoping mechanisms, I think 122's arm was the best combination of speed, strength, and smoothness, and also just all in all how good it looked while it functioned
I'm sure there were many other awesome mechanisms I never got a good look at, but those were the ones I saw up close. ah well, I hope other people vote too,
~Scott

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Posted by Andy Baker at 05/22/2001 10:09 AM EST


Engineer on team #45, TechnoKats, from Kokomo High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: my opinions
Posted by Scott England on 05/21/2001 10:46 PM EST:



Scott,

Thank you for your kind words. I'll try to explain how the process went for our double-drive motors.

After concepting our robot's design for one week, our team decided that we will need alot of power, as much traction as possible, and the ability to switch gears.

We wanted to use four motors on our drive system, but we still wanted to use the Bosch drillbox to switch gears, since we had success with that method over the past two years.

One of our team's engineers, Mark Koors, had the idea of attaching the output shaft of the Fisher-Price (FP) Motor to the back end of the Drill Motor. The rest of the team thought he was crazy. We were thinking... "yeah, right". But he still wanted to try it, and we decided as a team to take the risk, since Mark's ideas usually work very well.

Now, for the detailed design work, here's how it went: Mark conveyed his ideas to me and I designed the assembly in Unigraphics CAD. Since we had a similar drive motor system from last year, I just had to add some things to it to incorporate the FP motor. The print package was done in 2-3 days, and I released the prints.

Many of the parts on this assembly needed to be well aligned in order the the motors to work well together and not "wobble" too much. In order to keep the coupling in place, we had to make sure the motors were well-aligned. Many of the parts had dimensions that had to be very tightly held... as tight as 4-places (+/- 0.0005&quot.

All of the fabricated parts for this assembly were made by our school's machine trades class. This class of students used their skills to make these parts correctly, and within 10 or so days. And, they made enough for 2 spare assemblies (4 assemblies total).

Myself and another engineer, Kit Gerhart, supervised the assembly of the drives, as 5-6 of our students got lessons on how to assemble, debug and maintain these assemblies. Throughout the year, these students checked the assemblies, changed the motors, and made sure everything was in working order before each match.

As we did last year with our "Gear Switching and Motor Mount Design", we will publish this mechanical design during the off season (within a few weeks).

This assembly was not trouble-free. We had to change out 3 Drill motors and 4 FP motors, due to losing a weld on our coupling between the two motors. It was a risky design, but it was the foundation of our machine, and it was worth the effort. Luckily, all of these coupling failures happened while practicing in our shop and not at a competition.

I'll keep you posted on when I'll publish this design. Again, thanks for your interest.

Andy B.

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Posted by Gui Cavalcanti at 05/23/2001 5:09 PM EST


Student on team #422, Mech Tech, from Governor's School (GSGIS) and Verizon.


In Reply to: How 45's double-drive motors came together
Posted by Andy Baker on 05/22/2001 10:09 AM EST:



: One of our team's engineers, Mark Koors, had the idea of attaching the output shaft of the Fisher-Price (FP) Motor to the back end of the Drill Motor. The rest of the team thought he was crazy. We were thinking... "yeah, right". But he still wanted to try it, and we decided as a team to take the risk, since Mark's ideas usually work very well.

How in the world did you wire the drill motor without torquing the power wires off every time the FP motors kicked in?

-Gui

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Posted by Andy Baker at 05/24/2001 11:09 AM EST


Engineer on team #45, TechnoKats, from Kokomo High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: How in the world..
Posted by Gui Cavalcanti on 05/23/2001 5:09 PM EST:



... but it's hard to explain. We made a circular piece that fastened to the FP motor and clamped on the back of the drill motor. The circular piece had holes in the sides, where we could route the drill motor wires out. Also, these holes would let us see in and check the mechanical connection of the coupling.

Again... it's kinda hard to explain. Once the design is published, you'll see it wasn't that difficult to wire the motors.

Andy B.

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Posted by Joe Johnson at 05/24/2001 1:51 PM EST


Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: Not too hard to do
Posted by Andy Baker on 05/24/2001 11:09 AM EST:



Andy,

I love the concept of 2 motors driving the shiftable gearbox. But... I winch at your motors stacked end to end idea. I may love it once I see the concept in CAD, but for now, I am thinking that I may be able to get to the same place by putting the motors side by side.

I am thinking about making a mechanism that drives the sun gear input to the transmission (the gear that is normally on the shaft of the drill motor). We have done something like this in the past when we had seat motors driving the drill transmissions rather than the normal drill motors driving them. In any case, this mechanism may let both motors do the driving without the stacking problems you had to overcome. I can't quite see it yet, but I am thinking that something simple could be arranged.

As always, there are many ways to design & build a cat skinning machine ;-)


Joe J.

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Posted by Benjamin Piecuch at 05/25/2001 11:45 AM EST


Engineer on team #175, Buzz Robotics, from Erico Fermi High School and Hamilton Sundstrand.


In Reply to: How 45's double-drive motors came together
Posted by Andy Baker on 05/22/2001 10:09 AM EST:



We used the same Double-motor setup as 45. We piggy-backed the FP motors onto the Drills, and were able to use the standard gearbox. However, we still haven't taken advantage of the shifter mechanism. To accomplish the piggy-backing, we EB welded another gear to the rear output shaft on the Drill motors, and had a similar housing to link the two motors. We incorporated some cooling ports, a visual port to check the alignment, and a couple areas for the wires to be feed through. It worked perfected, and never had to replace either a drill or FP motor.

We did have some overheating problems with the FP motors, but that was after the season when we were doing a demo with the robot. We had the speaker stand in the goal, while we dragged him around on some pretty thick carpet. The motors didn't really like that.

Overall we had tons of power, and with some pretty grippy custom wheels our traction was excellent. Too bad we didn't have that system in last years' robot.

We were fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to be matched up in Galileo with the Technokats at Nationals. They eventually knocked us out in the semi's. Congrats to Team 45 once again on a great robot and a fantastic drive/balance system.


Ben Piecuch

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Posted by Andy Baker at 05/22/2001 10:47 AM EST


Engineer on team #45, TechnoKats, from Kokomo High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: What was the most innovative feature this year?
Posted by bill whitley on 05/21/2001 6:59 PM EST:



Here are the features I liked this year. As usual, I didn't get to see as many 'bots as I would've liked, that's for sure. There are many other excellent features on robots that I missed... these are just my favorites.

Best Drive Train: 71... pneumatic gear shifting, 4 wheel drive, load placement on two wheels at crucial times. Everyone wondered how they got it to look so easy... This is how.

Best Wheels: 111... They were hard to see, but they sure worked well. They really showed their stuff when their bot was used as a tow-bot.

Best Ball-Placing Arm: 67... how in the heck did they fold that thing up soooo tightly?

Best Goal Pushing Arms: 308... how many axii or movement was going on there? 5? 6? The coolest thing was the switchblade action of the pusher appendage

Best Goal Latching mechanisms: 33... they could grab the goals and let go so quickly, it was ridiculus.

Most Unique way to balance: 192... very un-conventional robot and team, with a very cool way to balance the bridge. GRT Rocks.

Most Dependable Balancer: 254... From their first regional to the nationals... these guys were money every time.

Coolest Looking Robot: 410... I think that this is the number of their team. They had a fiberglass shroud and paint job that was good as anyone's show car.

Neatest Operator Interface: 234... Yeah, they won awards all year long for their robo-arm control system, but I can't think of another system that was cooler.

Most Gutsy Drive System: 461... for a crew of Purdue college students to design a crab drive system, that took guts. They even switched it to tank steering at Nationals, and then back to crab at the IRI... amazing.

Andy B.

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Posted by Joe Taylor at 05/22/2001 3:42 PM EST


College Student on team #461, West Side Boiler Invasion, from West Lafayette High School and Purdue University .


In Reply to: My Favorites
Posted by Andy Baker on 05/22/2001 10:47 AM EST:



Andy,
Thanks for the "most gutsy drivetrain" award. Luckily i have almost a full year to let my teammates forget the pains of making our crab-drive a reality, since we've thought up some even crazier stuff for possible use next year!

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Posted by Mike Soukup at 05/22/2001 4:02 PM EST


Engineer on team #111, Wildstang, from Rolling Meadows & Wheeling and Motorola.


In Reply to: My Favorites
Posted by Andy Baker on 05/22/2001 10:47 AM EST:



: Most Dependable Balancer: 254... From their first regional to the nationals... these guys were money every time.

Jay, the 254 driver, is one of the best around, which is even more impressive since he's just a freshman (I've already told him that we're going to kidnap him for next season). He was able to balance on the first attempt most times & made balancing look easy, so I think 254 was the best manual balancer.

But the best overall balancer has to be 45 with its auto-balance. When 45 started up the bridge there wasn't any suspense because I knew it would end up balanced.

Mike

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Posted by Matt Reiland at 05/22/2001 7:51 PM EST


Engineer on team #226 from Troy, Troy Athens and General Motors CRW.


In Reply to: My Favorites
Posted by Andy Baker on 05/22/2001 10:47 AM EST:



I particularly liked team 111's wheels and their modular approach to the drive systems (my bet is you will see some copy's, on our robot next year)

Team 45 - using magic David Copperfield would drool over really cool - Awesome goal grabber also

Team 47 - where do I start, I wish our students can get excited enough to start getting that advanced

Hot Bot so compact and powerful, and fast - they also had pneumatic gearshifting if you look close, B.T.W. thanks for your your help with our gripping mechanism, we never got it working but you guys showed us the errors in the design

Team 177 - that robot gave 200% all the time

The green miracle workers with the bars that came out the sides, nice, never even thought of it

Team 308 - Wow

The beast with the perfect motion of putting the ball on the goal it is towing, designed perfection

There was a robot G-Force that had balancing arms that came down to the floor but it wasn't at Nationals. We tried to do the same thing but they executed it 10 times better

For a beautiful looking robot, I liked a diamler chrysler (warren stamping plant) had stained wood, gold anaodized aluminum, tank drive and auto steering, CNC plexiglas gears, a turret. Someone created a masterpiece

Ohh well maybe next year

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Posted by Bill Gold at 05/22/2001 9:25 PM EST


Student on team #258, The Sea Dawgs, from Lincoln High and KPC&B, Applied Materials, SJUSD, and Mr. Stokely.


In Reply to: My personal Favorites
Posted by Matt Reiland on 05/22/2001 7:51 PM EST:



: There was a robot G-Force that had balancing arms that came down to the floor but it wasn't at Nationals. We tried to do the same thing but they executed it 10 times better

That G-Force robot was from team 192 (GRT), they finished second in the Curie division.

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Posted by Bill Gold at 05/22/2001 9:30 PM EST


Student on team #258, The Sea Dawgs, from Lincoln High and KPC&B, Applied Materials, SJUSD, and Mr. Stokely.


In Reply to: GRT...
Posted by Bill Gold on 05/22/2001 9:25 PM EST:



Ken from GRT told me that division finalist sounded better :-)