My team has a fairly large are in which to practice, but the area is shared with many other school activities, including school lunch.
As such, any field we use would need to be set up and torn down at the start and the end of the practice. This puts a regulation size field pretty much out of the questions.
In lieu of that, I am considering making simple barriers that could contain the dreaded runaway robot. They would not even have to maintain their position in an impact. If they stop a runaway robot, then we can turn the robot off and then move the barriers back into position. I am wondering if anyone else has solved this problem.
My first idea is to make walls out of 2x10s, or 2x8s, or 2x6s, or 2x4s placed at a height where they would make good contact with the bumpers and then have a way to attach all the boards together. Then make enough of these to make a 24 foot by 32 foot area. That would be 14 planks.
My gut tells me that a 2x4 would not really be sufficient to stop a robot that accelerated at full speed for 32 feet, so there would have to be some testing done there and some experimentation to make sure the final solution is sound. As the connection points between the wood planks would not be fixed and could move, the wall would benefit from having some give. I suspect that using 2x8’s would be more than enough as long as there were no larger knots in the wood.
In any case, slamming the robot into various walls at full speed several times would give me a much better idea of what would be needed.
I am curious if anyone else has found a solution to this problem.
If you put carpet down, make sure to attach industrial-strength Velcro to the bottom of the boards. It won’t stop the robot fully, but it’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor slow it down long enough to get to the breaker!
Also, add some height–if it’s any sort of terrain game, or the robot has larger wheels, it’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor go right over the 2x4.
Get some junk 6x6’s from your local lumberyard. More’n likely they’ll give you a massive discount for taking the warped ones.
Home Depot won’t, though.
Blackhawks 2834 have a practice field set up using primarily 2x4s if I remember correctly. They went up around 4x bumper heights, and they definitely moved, but they worked. Livonia Warriors also had a similar setup and it seemed to work.
Of course we didn’t do any testing full speed. I dont believe it would hold up though, as the hopper from 2022 was moved multiple times going near full speed several times.
Or even about 5 feet of acceleration, depending on the setup. We’ve broken a 2x4 that was supported on both ends and impacted in the center when doing intake collapse testing. You’d definitely want frequent supports behind the 2x4s if you go that route.
I forgot one. K-rails, the plastic “fill-with-water” type. Get a few of those, they’ll slow the robot down pretty well. Add a few gallons of water to some or each for stopping power.
Mass, min barrier height, and friction/fastening with the carpet seem the key considerations. It seems like a lot of mass could create its own challenge.
Maybe 2x6’s screwed together at right angles, braced with additional right triangle pieces also screwed in, Velcro’d to the carpet?
My immediate thought is something with wall pieces that are drilled like giant “beads” and have bungee cords threaded through them, so the wall could stretch to absorb impact from robots without needing to stop them completely. this is an example of the concept on a much smaller scale.
It’s designed to be beef and really damn easy to make, leveraging dimensional lumbers benefits. Original design is from Andymark in 2008 (PDF in Onshape link), we just beefed it up some.
The corners are quite silly overbuilt, but we’ve been happy with this design.
581 did not make drivertations due to space/config constraints, but I included the assembly we build on 973 in 2018 (which I believe they’re still using)
Some notes for anyone copying
-Adjust the lengths as needed to fit your space. we made 72" and 36" lengths as that works well for the space we had to fit into
-the entire bottom is covered with velcro we stapled on, really helps hold it all together
-it’s heavy as heck with 6 2x4’s in the cross section, so it stays in place quite well
-the “side anchors” wood screw into the vertical 2x4’s on the ends of each wall section, and serve as the assembly/disassembly point (I wouldn’t trust this to be torn down 200 times, but should last quite a while before those boards get too blown out by screws)
-we lined ours with 1/8" polycarb to better emulate a real field, but this could be skipped and cut the overall project cost way down
-The Side anchors could instead be purely made out of dimensional lumber, but 973 hooked us up with the wood gussets which let us assemble those a bit faster
The official field walls are just attached to each other at the top and solidly velcro’d to the carpet and they can take some pretty good hits so I think you’re on decent idea. I helped teardown at a recent off-season event and was impressed at what something with a couple of hundred sq in of velcro could withstand. Separating them from the carpet is a non-trivial effort so there is a lot of strength there; you couldn’t lift them away - we had to use a sheet of something like HPDE to slide between the velcro and the carpeting to separate them and that took some real shoving to get down the length of the wall section.
If the corners of the “field walls” connect, they’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor provide some mutual support and you probably don’t even need the triangular bracing which would save a lot of material, fabrication, weight, and space which is all a big deal here. A velcro’d 2x4 base would probably have enough grip to get the job done especially when connected to adjacent sections.
