Aerial Assist--Perspective from a low-resource team

[magnets]

Well, this year, I'm with a new team (well 2, but it's complicated), and I've spent only the last week working with them. It's a great team with awesome people, but in all their history (5 years), they've only gone to eliminations once, and it was as a pure "box on wheels" role to play defense. The team has good ideas and can implement them, it's just that something never seems to go just right for them to be successful. This year however, they just got more support to make a limited number (think like two gearbox plates total) of CNC parts. Their shop has 1 drill press, 1 pretty crappy mini lathe, and a small bandsaw + drills/hand tools. I'm used to having 3 mills, an awesome huge CNC lathe, CNC mills, a CNC router, and all the tooling in the world to prototype with, so I expected this season to seem, well, a little slow.

I was incredibly surprised when on Tuesday, the first time I met with the team, they'd put together the kitbot (they've got some pretty great students, some of the best I've ever worked with), and a few kids had put together an awesome pickup device, that, due to nifty angled rollers, could pickup the ball from any angle in the front, and worked better that the Ri3D teams did.

A few days later, me and one of the kids put together a catapult with a clever joint I've nicknamed the knee. In the unloaded position, it's like a bent human knee. you push on it with a cylinder, and it pushes up on the end of the catapult to load it. As it gets closer to the end, it gains mechanical advantage due to the nifty angles, then goes past perfectly straight and locks into place, no latch required. Then, a little string pulls back on the knee, lets it go and the ball flies into the goal. The whole thing took a student and me less than 5 hours to build.

Right now, we've got a robot that can pickup a ball pretty well, shoot it very accurately (we use the edge of the low goal to line up), and catch it's own truss pass, using the kit bot, pneumatics from last year KoP, and first choice items. It's the end of week one, and the robot's done! This team doesn't usually start auto mode programming until after stop build, so we don't know what to work on.

In some ways, it's a blessing for low resource teams, but I'm imagining my old team right now, knowing that they've probably already assembled their custom chassis, built their shooter/pickup already, and are wondering what to do just like us. I remember being blown away by the robonauts being able to have a functional robot by the end of week three, but now, a low budget, really simple team able to meet our goal of "do everything" at the end of week one?

So, as my team has asked me to ask CD, what next? What innovative features has your team come up with to make their robots better, and how can a team, like mine right now, build something else? We've already got a launcher/pickup/blocker and we don't know what to do next. We've considered a new drive (swerve or just a fast, shifting 6wd), but we can't afford it or justify it. The kit drive is pretty darn good.