Did YOUR team use bumpers?

[DanL]

While watching some of the webcasts, it occured to me that very few teams actually used bumpers. Since I've been stuck in my room doing nothing but bio work for the past three days, I'd like to know why! So, take the poll, and post your stories here!

[Mark Hamilton]

We decided to go bumperless because fo weight. Also we had plenty of room in the envelope to add bumpers in the form of flat wood + lexan. These provide better protection with less weight, and dont have to fit the soft and removable requirements of actual bumpers.

[David Kelly]

we used some blue fun noodles for our bumpers. we jsut ziptied them to our 80/20 extrusion frame

[fast frank]

we kinda used bumpers, but they were aluminum so they didn't provide much of a cushion, plus they fit in the original required dimensions.

[GregT]

all bumpers do is fall off, from what i've seen anyways.

If your robot can't take a hit without a bumper it probably won't take a hit WITH a bumper.

Another point- almost all the damage done to my team's robot came from coliding with the goal when grabing it, we can't have a bumper because it gets in the way of our grip, i see this being so on many other teams robots.

Greg

[K. Skontrianos]

We used foam bumpers on the front end of our robot. They were angled so they helped to funnel balls into our conveyor. Most importantly, our engineer sewed the dark-red silky fabric that covered them. (It wasn't really silk, but felt like it) I don't think I've ever seen a sewing job quite like that before ; )

[kacz100]

We also had a "bumper" but it was a 12 - 14 inch goal grabber that would flip down. This was used to grab a goal at full speed and never caused damage to us. We also only got into 2 pushing matches and won both, one pushing match was against our ball conveyer (unprotected).

[cyanutopia]

Team 624 used those little pool noodle things for bumpers---they got pretty mangled up during competition, but I don't know who much damage our robot would've had without them. But what can I say, the bumpers' bright green color accents the color of our robot's eyes...

[Matt Attallah]

We thought about putting on a bumper, than came weight and dimentions. After we played w/ the robot, we realised the strength, and started to ram goals and (not purposley) hit robots to spin them around. Our robot is/was/will for ever be very, very robust...

[Pengiun Joe]

Our teams entire robot was covered in diamond plate, and we bumped a lot of things with it. Does that count as a bumper?

[Wetzel]

You can have weight to spare?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

We use some bent up lexan on one side of the robot. It does an OK job and keeps us from getting beat up on the side boundary when going for balls.
Good Luck In Florida

[mpking]

Originally posted by Wetzel
You can have weight to spare?

Yea, it's called
"It'll never fly Orville"

20 minutes before it goes in the box, you rip a system off your bot because you never got it to work reliably.


What? You guys don't do that if you don't get the 5 9's performance? 99.999

[Wetzel]

Originally posted by mpking


Yea, it's called
"It'll never fly Orville"

20 minutes before it goes in the box, you rip a system off your bot because you never got it to work reliably.


What? You guys don't do that if you don't get the 5 9's performance? 99.999

20 minutes? You didn't put in in the box and go 'Crap! Where are we gonna get 3 lbs?'

We never had time to run the teather as an integrated subsystem anyway.