I recently watched a few matches of the Taiwan Unoffical Event and there were several Everybot climbers there. They were having a lot more trouble getting it working than I was hoping. A few things I learned just from watching the video:
If you have a light robot you will likely need to put significant extra weight on the front of your robot so that when flipping up the hooks and getting on the bar you don’t tip backwards (as much).
You need to make sure the hooks stay up when flipped the pivot point there isn’t easy so spend some time testing that.
There is a lot of careful construction that has gone into the Everybot and modifications, while they can see small and inconsequential, can have a significant impact.
Climbing with another robot in the way (like the link above) will be very difficult as you need to run “through” the bar for this to work which means you need significant free space.
Teams that aren’t doing anything else (no defense to be played) should probably just go ahead and climb (in case something goes wrong they can try again). It seemed like at this event everyone was waiting until the last 30 seconds but you can start at any time!
Interesting side not it looked like several teams had good success shooting into the low goal by bouncing the ball into the roof. Not what I was expecting.
I would love to hear more from teams who are actively testing the Everybot climber in person and what challenges they have had! I hope we will see some success with the climber at the Week 0 today.
Thanks for sharing these great tips. I have also seen more teams struggling to make the climb work than I was hoping for. We’ll take responsibility for that. The design is a little particular and must be manufactured and assembled with careful attention to detail. A few additional tips:
The springs are required. They cannot be omitted unless you want to only climb to the low rung. They are placed in the right location, which needs to stay within about 1/2" of manufacturing tolerance.
The spacers which react against the faces of the box tubes are critical. They see significant loading when climbing and keep the hooks in the right place.
You need to line up the drivetrain perpendicular with the rungs. You can’t drive in at mach 10 and expect to hang. You can drive into the rungs very slowly and still successfully hang. If the CG of your robot is similar to Everybot as documented, you need very little momentum to ramp into the valley of the hooks. Err on the side of going too slow until you have had the time to practice it many times.
Coordinate with your partners. The rung is wide enough to fit two robots with basic planning beforehand. Even if a partner is intending to climb high enough to be out of the way, ask them to justify to one side so that you have space in the event that they have trouble getting all the way up.
Thanks for the info, Ethan! When y’all were making the Everybot, did you run into any issues with the climb during testing, and if so, could you share your approach to overcoming those issues?
I think you have done a great job! This was not at all intended as a dig on Everybot or its climber. I just want every team that builds this to be successful!
For teams that have a different CG, what advice do you have for them? I assume if they can repositioning the hooks would be ideal?
With our everybot there are some changes we made though I don’t have the full mechanical picture and have a number of concerns that may or may not be issues.
Mainly, with the climb being very shallow, I am a little concerned we’ll find the competition field to be slightly different than our home bar and that we haven’t built in the adjustable that we may require. Others seem content that they can adjust later, so I’m not sure where that will end up.
We haven’t seemed to yet have any flip up issues.
We did break a wooden plywood arm in practice and now have uhwpe arms.
Our holes and pattern are questionable I think. They seem to struggle a little with this. This feeds a little into the concern about field tolerances because we are reliant to make any adjustments on home turf when we may have missed marked.
We did make the hook angle more shallow. It is able to climb at pretty slow speed. High speed is not desirable because the impact isn’t transferred in a controlled manner. We will have a driver speed setting for climbing so they can drive slower.
The driver’s did note today that they could access the hangar for cargo from the side. Which was a concern about if cargo gather there.