Hi Chief Delphi! This is my teams first time doing swerve and I need some bumper help. We have a rough idea right now that will definitely work, but it’s not the most clean and efficient engineering-wise. Any advice, inspiration, ideas, etc. for swerve bumpers?
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254’s bumpers this mounted with metal blocks in the corners. I described it more in this post.
We liked this approach because it kept all the mounting in the corners on the modules probably in spots you don’t have any other type of superstructure/A-frame anyway.
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wait, the corner blocks were the only mounting points? i had assumed that the corner blocks were supplemental.
I have built bumpers using Triple Helix’s guide, and I liked them in the past but with the forces we are seeing with swerve they are a bit underbuilt. But they are still a good resource for solid simple construction and wrapping, but look elsewhere for mounting hardware.
I am very interested in this new configurable design from 900.
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We initially had 2 small L brackets on each side of the side framerails, so the corner blocks were initially supplemental. However we had to remove one of the L brackets from each side to make room for our floor intake, so they became the most important mounting point, especially with the hard collisions this year.
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thanks! it’s a one piece bumper right?
We did one piece bumpers, a modified corner bracket from the hardware store that bolts to the corner of the swerve modules.
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yep!
To piggyback on this post, are conrer bumpers a terrible idea for swerve? I’m imagining that there could be some hangups when you’re trying to spin around another robot. We’ve done coner bumpers for a while now to avoid creating a new set every year. I’m curious if others feel like making a C set or a full perimeter set should be a priority.
Corner bumpers have been a not-great option since Week 6 of 2019. (Week 5 of 2019 being the last time corner bumpers had any sort of advantage, of the “give your opponents tech fouls and cards” variety in that case.)
Sure, they’re great for reuse year to year. But they need to be solidly attached. And every time you miss the angle and snag 'em, they get less solid/more shredded.
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We do ours similarly, we use wingnuts to fasten the bumpers to the bolts protruding from the frame to make it easy to take on and off
There also was a 3/8-16 thumbscrew (1 per left/right) going through an L-bracket clearance hole off the bumper, through the 2x1 framerail, then threading into a threaded 1/4" steel plate riveted to underside of frame. So these kinda help hold the bumper in the middle, but the way our bumpers are built, with strong 2x2x1/4" L-channel in corners, the bumpers themselves are kinda structural and self supporting, so just the corner brackets is probably enough.
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Here is our bumper wrapping process.
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Hey everyone, our team is looking to make the switch to swerve drive next season, so we are working on learning some aspects of swerve before the season.
Something that we’ve always had a hard time with was not figuring out bumper attachments until it was too late, so this year we want to incorporate the attachments into our frame template.
So: How do other teams attach bumpers to a swerve frame?
The public CADs we found didn’t have the attachment methods in their models, so I thought I’d ask here. Any help is appreciated, thank you!
2910 included their mounts in their onshape model.
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In the past, my team has just drilled holes near each corner of our frame, then put rivet nuts in them. We then just used bolts to mount the bumpers to the frame. I’m a big fan of using bolts to mount bumpers (even if they’re slower than other mounting hardware), just make sure the mounting brackets are durable enough to stay aligned with the rivnuts after hard collisions.
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Our team falls in to the rivnut camp as well. Last year we had many poor attempts at bumpers that ended up sacrificing strength for “convenience”. These always ended up getting bent and being a pain to mount. In the run up to an offseason comp we tried out 6 rivnuts (we use two section c-shaped bumpers), one rivnut on the long edge, and 1 at each end of a section. Using an impact driver it takes at most 2 minutes to change out bumpers, they look very clean, and are very robust.
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Here’s a solution for SDS mk4s and other modules that leave a tube corner hole open. A post below that shows a potential variation for mk4is.
We have used reversable bumpers for many years, they are a little complicated to sew, however we never have to take them off after inspection, change very fast, and have held up very well. This means that there is less importance on the mounting, as we typically just bolt them to the frame, or these sheet metal mounting brackets. I can share an instruction sheet if you’d like to see it.
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