Crazy Robot Inspection Stories

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Battery used for counter weight on a moving arm to help hold robot on pipe. This was actually legal that year.

I've always wanted to do that, because I know it would bother people. To bad my 2008 trebuchet with a battery counter weight got over ruled...

[dtengineering]

1) I inspected a robot... in Atlanta... that didn't have a pressure relief valve anywhere in their pneumatic system. Fortunately they had it with them in their supplies, and were quite appreciative to have someone explain what it was and what it did. It wouldn't have been crazy to see this at a regional... but in Atlanta? Thank goodness for inspections, eh?

2) A crazy good story, though was the time we carelessly re-used a 3/4" pneumatic cylinder on our Rack'n'Roll robot that was either 1/2" too long or too short for the pneumatic specs of that year's competition. It cleared tech in Portland no problem (hey... I'd missed it, too... it was a pretty minor thing) but got nabbed by the very careful inspectors at GTR. We had a spare at home that was the right size... but home was on the other side of the country.

Tristan Lall was the lead inspector. He took a look at the problem, pulled out his cell phone, made a couple calls and said, "Talk to ______ at ______. Here's the address, they have a legal one waiting for you." A mentor ran out at lunch, and we were legal that afternoon. The robot actually performed better with the slightly shorter stroke cylinder. Who woulda thunk it?

3) I was at a competition where a team was 30 pounds overweight. Not a big deal... except they were an all-girls team and quickly became known as "The girls with the weight problem." at least until we realized how easily that could be taken out of context. (If only I could shed weight as quickly as they did!)

Jason

[JohnBoucher]

[quote=Al Skierkiewicz;941858
Circular saw blades for wheels, "But they really grab the carpet!".[/quote]

OMG We ARE Battlebots !!!

[Rick Wagner]

In 2003 I was a rookie mentor on a legacy team (294, world champions in '01) at the Arizona Regional. At 6 PM on Thursday the robot had failed inspection a couple of times and we were working off the list of items needing fixing. The pits were open 'til 8 that evening, and I was asked to stay with a couple of students to finish up and get the robot inspected while the rest of the team went out to dinner. Just before the pits closed, we got the robot up to the inspection station, and found one more item needing fixing. The pneumatic system pressure gage was mounted under the robot facing the floor so it couldn't be read! That's how a rookie mentor pays his dues.

[EricH]

Reminds me of the last team to pass at Arizona this year. They'd been trying to fix their pneumatics, they had a match coming up, and they thought they had it. Two inspectors (myself being one) were inspecting their robot, and each had one gauge. They power up...and both gauges read 120 PSI! OK, let's dial it down to 60 PSI, guys. They did--and both gauges read 60 PSI. The first place we looked for the problem? The regulator. Sure enough, the input was going into an output, and I think the gauge was in the input slot--in short, 90 degrees from the way it should have been oriented. With a match coming up, we had them pull the compressor breaker. They later got their pneumatics working right and reinspected.

Oh, and another team had pneumatics--but had no vent valve and no relief valve. Uh-oh. The next time they came around, they had both.

[SavtaKenneth]

In the Israeli regional a team had passed inspection with their bumper perimeter not covering the entire frame perimeter due to having a rotating kicker. I saw this on the field and was very highly amused.

[Jon Stratis]

Two items from our robot this year:
- Both sets of bumpers weigh exactly the same - this drew a little surprise from the inspectors!
- Al's gonna hate this... but our radio is essentially buried in the middle of a big aluminum box this year. From testing though, we had no signal problems, and no problems on the field!

[JaneYoung]

I'm never quite sure what to think when our team has left a Championship inspector scratching his head but using the word, innovative. The actual sentence was, " I've never seen that before but it is definitely innovative."

It had to do with our shooter a few years back and eventually, it passed inspection. After that experience, innovative became one of my favorite words.

A side story to the experience - one of the pit crew members was a senior on the team but a rookie member. We still talk about his year on the team and the contributions he made towards the design and building of that robot. He had never been to the Championship before and it was a huge learning experience for him as an individual and as a member of the team. When we left Atlanta, he was better for it. A lot had to do with working with the inspector, listening to him, and with talking with and observing other teams. It's one reason I hold ChrisH in such high regard. Because of the impact he made on a student's experience in Atlanta.

Jane

[Dantvman27]

My freshman year(Aimhigh), our shooter had two motors on it, and we were 3 pounds over weight, and the specs said each motor was a 4 pound motor, so we took one off, re-weigh, and we were heavier than before...

[Tom Line]

This year. Our weight was fluctuating between inspections without us changing ANYTHING. The scale was confirmed to not be reading exactly right, but the numbers were changing!

Let's just say that parkay floors and standing too close to the scale = bad.

[Just a Mom]

We had bright yellow painted numbers on our bumpers because we had a nice mom who was happy to work with two students to do the numbering. The problem turned out to be that they were over 1/2 inch wide but not 3/4 inch wide. You also can't have two colors so we couldn't just make them wider with a sharpie. The mom felt so bad that she drove an hour to the school got the paint, drove an hour back and made the numbers bigger. Hope she still volunteers next year. I know the rules are clear but no one caught the mistake.

Another team put on numbers from the hardware store. They were black and white and really easy to read. You can't have two colors so they had to take the numbers off, cut off all the white and put the numbers back on. At least the numbers were black so they could make them wider with a sharpie. Without the contrast it was hard to see them on the blue but they met the rules.

[jblay]

Last year at NYC one team showed up with their KOP and a bunch of plywood. They refused to accept the help of us or any other team because they believed that every team was out to get them. They did however borrow a circular saw from one team.

Their mentor was cutting plywood with the circular saw and did not realize that the wire was on top of the piece of wood. When the saw stopped running he became very confused. The team who the saw was burrowed from was upset to say the least.

By the end of the day they had a drive train with some wooden thing on top that didn't really do anything but hold the balls in the bot the entire match. When they went to get their robot inspected I saw piles of saw dust in their pit, it was quite a site.

[Zach Purser]

Originally Posted by Just a Mom

We had bright yellow painted numbers on our bumpers because we had a nice mom who was happy to work with two students to do the numbering. The problem turned out to be that they were over 1/2 inch wide but not 3/4 inch wide. You also can't have two colors so we couldn't just make them wider with a sharpie. The mom felt so bad that she drove an hour to the school got the paint, drove an hour back and made the numbers bigger. Hope she still volunteers next year. I know the rules are clear but no one caught the mistake.

Another team put on numbers from the hardware store. They were black and white and really easy to read. You can't have two colors so they had to take the numbers off, cut off all the white and put the numbers back on. At least the numbers were black so they could make them wider with a sharpie. Without the contrast it was hard to see them on the blue but they met the rules.

I thought some of the bumper rules were too strictly enforced this year. Yes, I know the rules are very specific, but some of the things that were being enforced provided no advantage to the team that goofed them. One rule that got us was having the bumper flush with the exterior vertex of the robot. We added a 2" x 2" x 1/8" reinforcing plate to the outside of the frame on the front corners of our robot (we cracked a gusset after a hard landing), and the polycarb attached to the frame also covered the plates. The inspector said that since the polycarb was spaced out another 1/8" over the plates that defined our exterior vertex, so as it was the bumpers needed to move out another 1/8". The solution was simple, we just cut the polycarb that was covering the plates, but it just seemed like such a nitpicky thing.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Just a Mom

Another team put on numbers from the hardware store. They were black and white and really easy to read. You can't have two colors so they had to take the numbers off, cut off all the white and put the numbers back on. At least the numbers were black so they could make them wider with a sharpie. Without the contrast it was hard to see them on the blue but they met the rules.

Are you sure this is a rule? I've seen more than one team run with a white number outlined in black, or a yellow number outlined in black, etc.

[Marc P.]

At the NYC Regional this year, 2836's robot was fully assembled for the first time Thursday morning. First thing we did was throw it on the inspection scale- 124.1 pounds. We had anticipated being ~5 pounds overweight, and had the materials on hand to replace a number of steel pillow blocks and idler shafts with aluminum spares. All told, we ended up at 119.8 pounds in time for our first qualification match.

Over the course of the day, we tweaked a few things, adding and subtracting little parts here and there. To be prepared for the impending elimination match re-inspection Sunday, we weighed in again Saturday night (this being a Fri-Sat-Sun regional), and again were at 119.8.

So Sunday rolls around, and we make it to the elimination rounds. Being as far behind schedule as they were, event officials called for elimination robots to be quickly re-inspected- meaning a quick once over, and weight to be checked with batteries and bumpers installed.

The idea was, take the total weight of the robot, subtract the recorded weight for the bumpers (from the original inspection), and subtract a standard weight for the battery (something like 13.3 pounds). With bumper and "battery" weight subtracted, our robot was calculated to be 121.4 pounds.

Not understanding how we suddenly gained 1.6 pounds, I instructed our students to quickly remove the bumpers. Subtracting the "battery" weight still landed us at 121.4 pounds. I unplugged and removed the battery, and the scale fluctuated between 119.9 and 120.0 pounds.

Lesson learned- battery weight isn't always standard, especially if you have a decent length of 6 gauge wire with the Anderson connector attached.