PROTOTYPING AND INSIGHTS
We are done with our meeting times until Saturday, and it’s been a productive week. Very excited to take a few days off from things and absorb ideas for a while. Also excited to sleep and spend time on other stuff!
Today we CAD’ed and CNC’d several intaking prototypes. Since we are Open Alliance we will be happy to share these files with anyone interested; here is the link to the intake roller you’ll see in the videos below.
Prior to this, we tested the “pinch” spacing (less than 1/2") in order to see if we could make the cube and cone behave anything like the robot shown here (Iron Panthers 2018) and the answer was no. The medical wrap we used for this test (wrapped around 1.25" polycarbonate tube rollers, spares from our 2022 robot) literally eats the cone material when squeezed too tightly, and the cube just gets rejected after a quick expansion. As shown above, this is about 2" of space between the rollers (3.25" center to center), which worked much better with both game pieces. We were able to get the cone to align itself in the rollers from a number of orientations. We believe that with the addition of another roller and some height adjustments, we might be able to intake both cubes and cones from the floor, and align cones vertically from most angles of attack. This would be a game-changer for us. We will work on this design, create a new prototype, and test it on a moving chassis on Saturday.
NARROWING THINGS DOWN
It’s going to be incredibly important that we be able to decide on a design and construct it with time to practice cycles and work on programming. We are looking at several factors that will influence our final decisions.
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Robot Architecture. We want to have as few degrees of freedom as we can manage. We want to reduce drastically the risk of a ridiculously long swing arm and the ensuing carnage (with misalignment being a major problem). A crane (influenced by the robots of the 2013 BEST Competition) and an internal passive alignment (shown here in our 2016 off-season project) are the leading contenders for making a simple robot that can score quickly from all positions. We will let you know what we go with (maybe both).
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Game Piece(s) Manipulator. This may actually be less important, because we think whatever we choose to go with it will be modular and replaceable with something better later on. Currently the leading candidates are a full-width horizontal roller intake (shown above) or a vertical rolly claw.
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Vision. Accurately aligning for both intaking and scoring game pieces will be critical and very difficult this year. Teams that think their success in the 2022 game will transfer easily to 2023 are badly deceived and need to face the fact that both acquisition and scoring are much more difficult this year, even discounting that the game pieces are not familiar and behave differently to the balls we’ve had to play with since our seniors were in 8th grade. Be wary! It does look like using vision is much easier if you are further from your goals, rather than parked right in front of them (where the April Tags are). Also worth noting that retro targets disappear once game pieces are scored on them.
That’s all for now. Be safe, have fun, and take breaks!
Mr. N