pic: FRC Team 1501 T.H.R.U.S.T. presents

[Chris_Elston]

Originally Posted by tindleroot

Great robot, easily one of the most competitive in Indiana. I don't think I saw the drop down collector this past weekend - were you just driving the robot over the boulders to pick them up or is my memory failing me?

Nope, good catch.

We had the over the bumper collector at North Carolina. And it broke nearly every match. We struggled with harvesting in North Carolina. So for Tippecanoe, we moved the harvesting roller behind the bumper zone for protection and added a 3rd camera servo position to look at boulders going into the intake. This increased our average from 2 boulders shot in the high goal at NC to 5 boulders shot in the high goal at Tippy. If we can't see the boulders, we drive from camera feedback, so there is a brief pause sometimes when we collect a boulder, but that's better than jamming a boulder and can't shoot.

It was a design iterations we do on our team, like I am sure many other teams do. Sometimes things don't work well in the heat of the competition so we are always trying to improve a design.

PS: That's the first collector we've ever tried to make on our team, next time, we will do better and learned alot.