Pitfalls to avoid when brainstorming the 2011 game and robot

[IKE]

Originally Posted by JaneYoung

But what does that mean?

Does that mean the bumpers are annoying or -
does that mean that not enough time and thought is given to them?

How are they a pitfall to be avoided?

Jane

The bumpers are essentially think enough that they keep the robot a bit further off of the wall. For 2010, once you include bumper thickness and 1" of wheel/chassis width, you are essentially at the center-lin of the ball. Contacts at that point tend to actually drive the ball into the wall as opposed from peeling it off of the wall. This is due to wall friction causing the ball to spin away from your bot and into the wall. Even really good collecting mechanisms had trouble with this.
This was especially bad in the corner goals as the padding caused another edge to block the ball from going into the goal. Thus teams struggling to push the ball in those last foot.
Visually this made the robots look quite clumsy and added an unexpected degreee of difficulty to collecting and the "simple task" of pushing a ball into the goal.

The pitfall to avoid here would be testing a prototype or concept without the offset induced by the bumpers. There were a couple ball collecting ideas that were fine in the past (pre-bumper), that would have significant difficulty with the "wall manuever" if they were moved out 3 inches...