Coolest Robot Trick of 2001

[gniticxe]

Thanks for the nomination Dan! Our team nicknamed the little arms "wings," and as one of the students who worked on them, I kinda feel obligated to say something about them. First of all, their success rate was not quite 100%. There were a few times when we didn't have the right weights from the goals, so the CG wasn't quite centered. And then there was the time when in the excitement of a high scoring round at Drexel (?) we killed with the wings exteneded and lost the 4x multiplier because we were touching the playing field...D'oh! But overall, they did a very nice job.
Anyway, the design was really simple: it was just the globe motor mounted to a rack and pinion system. When the pinion mounted to the globe spun, the 2 racks (the wings themselves, one above, one below) extended out of the robot just offset from the robot's CG. The idea was to catch the bars extending from the bridge and eventually come to a complete rotational stop when we hit the playing field divider. To be sure the force on the wings didn't simply bend them (we had to go at the bridge with full speed), we made the wings quite 'beefy.' Thats about it, and thanks again.