For this years competition we decided to give lifting a go. I designed a lift mechanism, but it was very slow and had lots of problems. During competition it only worked during one match (but I gotta say, it worked at the best possible time).
Our mentor is convinced that there’s some type of commercial of the shelf lift mechanism. I’ve done a little searching on websites such as WCP, but I can’t find any prebuilt lift mechanisms, so I was wondering if any of you know if there are any.
Alternatively if you don’t know, I’d really appreciate advice on how to build a fast and reliable lift mechanism. The one we had this year used a rope to lift a hook and then a winch to lift the robot. We had lots of problems with the rope getting stuck in gears and uneven tension in the pipes. Any advice on how to improve would be greatly appreciated.
I would highly recommend watching some Robot in 3 Days teams for 2020 and see what they’ve done. Also, check out Everybot for a simple climb mechanism. But if you’re set on a COTS, you were right to look at WCP. Check out their Competitive Concept. They use the Greyt Universal Elevator IIRC.
I’ve seen that elevator before, but it seems wasteful to have all that mechanism for just a lift. It seems like it would be more useful if your using it for a major mechanism in ADDITION to lifting. And besides, does it have enough power to lift a robot?
If you can fit it, making many specialized mechanisms will reduce design complexity, and make the whole system more modular.
Lean and efficient design is generally a good thing. But, time and effort are also resources to be conserved. Generally, spending time and effort to continue to optimize after requirements have been met is not a recommended practice.
Rev also have a rev lift kit available. We used it in 2018. It went together pretty quickly, but we did have some issues with bearing coming off the tracks.
If you are thinking of any of the COTS elevators as not efficient, think about the fact that you can use the exact same kit year after year because it is COTS. This is not necessarily true in terms of robot weight and functionality though.
This is the kit we used on our climb this year. It worked out pretty good for us being tall robot. We are thinking about changing up the gear ratio on the mini-cim that powers it though to make it quicker.
