Wondering if anyone knows of examples where manipulators were mounted on both sides of an elevator carriage (meaning the “front” and “back”). I know there are cross beams on the “back” of the elevator where the rigging is mounted so I don’t even know if it’s possible to do. But I’m hoping to solicit CD’s big brains to help our team find examples if they exist.
From my place of ignorance, it seems that we could also mount to the backside of the top of the first stage of the elevator and just not have it completely retract that first stage which might get around the cross beam issue…? We wouldn’t need full elevator height for the back side of the elevator, just 1 stage’s worth of height change potentially.
I don’t know too many that have mechs on both sides however look at 254 in 2018 or high tides elevator in 2023, where the endeffector went through the elevator. Also can’t wait to see you guys at lake superior!
While I wouldn’t generally use our 2019 robot for reference, we did this by simply building a carriage that wrapped around the outside of the elevator. This meant we didn’t need to worry about pass-through clearance or designing without the top crossbrace. (I think this is the same/similar to 3641’s, but I can’t tell for sure in their images)
Was a bit janky, but with some refinement could probably work well.
330 did one way back in 2001 (and that elevator was mounted on a turret IIRC).
One catch, though: said manipulators were actually mounted off the “sides” of the elevator, which was oriented “sideways” at match start. I want to say it was also “inverted” with the widest section on top, but I’m 75% sure that’s not correct (just don’t remember how).
111 had a crazy elevator in 2023 that let them keep the front and back clear for a pass-through arm. It was cool, but challenging to pull off successfully.
All of the examples are really awesome. The ones from @alex.richards48 and @Aree_Vanier were exactly what our team members were talking about (but didn’t know how to do). Not saying we’re going to do that of course but I wanted to know that it had been done at least once before letting them run with it for a couple days prototyping.
I fully acknowledge the complexities of a choice like this. Again, appreciate all the help!!
Not exactly what you asked, but this can also be done with a sideways elevator. I can’t think of any with non-pivoting manipulators on both sides but these come to mind:
A pretty big key here is that the mechanisms themselves did not pass through the elevator here just the game object. You have a lot lower risk of something going wrong that way.
There are some robots that have passed the intake/manipulator fully through itself (1678 2019) but they scrapped that functionality mid season so Im assuming it was a pain.
2122 2019, I don’t have good images so its hard to figure out exactly how they did it.
195 2019, if we ignore the turret for a bit, reverse tiling the elevator stages allows mounting to both sides of the carriage easily and securely because the cross-beam is inside the elevator and out of your way. This comes at the fairly significant cost of making it difficult to not cantilever the elevator. A back carriage can easily block all diagonal support locations.
Looking back at the turret, this robot could’ve turreted hatches if the cargo intake didn’t get in its own way.
1072 did this in 2019 and it was definitely a pain. We ended up just turning around more often than not, but there were unique scoring locations for both sides of the robot (one side was better for L2 and one was better for L1). We executed it not super well.
We did succeed that year, but it was in spite of the architecture, not because of it. That said, we definitely could have a done a better job on the design and made it much more effective.
