pic: 3 wheel omni drive concept

[Ari423]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

This is far from the first wooden robot frame in FRC - teams have been doing laser cut wood frames for years. They can be done very robustly.

Originally Posted by s_forbes

Wood is good! It's far and away my favorite material. With bumper rules in place, you don't have a lot of metal on wood contact. I wouldn't expect anyone to hit this type of robot very hard anyway, because there's a chance it would fall onto your robot if you get too rough.

I wasn't saying that wood robots won't work. I've seen a few of them and they often work well. All I was saying was if there is a gap in the bumpers large enough for another robot to hit inside, you could see legal wood on metal contact (with a manipulator outside the hitting robot's frame perimeter) and that scares me.

As for not wanting to hit that robot because of the possibility of tipping it: if I were a ref and I saw a robot play defense on yours resulting in a tip, I would be hesitant to call that an intentional tip. When you build a robot like that, you should expect heavy defense and make very sure your anti-tipping mechanism work as well as the inherent anti-tipping properties of a normal robot. Teams should not penalized because they were defending against a robot that isn't well build to play the game (which includes defense).