I’ve really been wondering about how many teams used the field rope, or other thick ropes.
I’m curious because our teams robot was the only one at our regionals to use such a thick rope. Here is a picture of us climbed. Our climber used two angled shafts to trap the rope and wind it up.
You’re right, very few teams used the field rope. Yours is a pretty effective mechanism though. Congrats on accomplishing a difficult challenge!
Interesting approach, I think most teams took one look at the stock ropes, read what was allowed in the manual, and immediately dismissed the idea of even trying to use the stock ropes. Of the few that have attempted, yours is probably the first I’ve seen that actually does it well.
This is an image of our climber which has the capability of climbing the field rope (it was tested outside competition). However, we opted for a smaller diameter rope for the sake of consistency. The climber consisted of two aluminum plates with a pentagonal hole pattern. In each of these holes was a 5 inch long spike. These two “jaws” were held together by constant force springs. Before the start of the match, we would set the climber by zip tying each jaw to the frame. When the driver lined the robot up against the rope at the end to the match to climb, they would simply turn the motor and the zip ties would snap. The jaws would then slam shut around the rope and the robot would climb. This design emulated the way one winds spaghetti with a fork, and it won us the creativity award at the Silicon Valley regional.
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1726 did not use the field rope, but did use the same type of rope (from first choice) cut to their desired length.
Found the reveal video for your robot pKlopp. https://youtu.be/QWIYHvkKkNM That is a really cool design.
Thanks! Unfortunately it wasn’t working properly when we filmed that. We were using zip ties that were too strong so they didn’t snap easily. We also were rotating the climber the wrong way, almost tripling our climb time. Rotating it the way we did in the video directed all the thrust of a 140 lb robot into the CIM motor, causing it to struggle quite a bit. We only realized this after the Sacramento regional. Our climb time at SVR was 5 seconds over the 15 at Davis after simply reversing the direction of the motor.
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I saw quite a few teams for which the stock rope was installed. But no robots that actually used it.
A little off topic, but I’m curious if any teams climbed another team’s rope? It was a topic my drive team joked about a bit during our last off-season competition. Specifically, with the numerous teams using Velcro to acquire the ropes, it would have been entirely possible to climb another Velcro-friendly rope if some peculiar circumstances were to arise during a match. Does anyone have an example of this happening?
I feel like this happened at one of the events I FTAAd, but finding the exact match would be difficult.
Turing match 108 had an attempt on the blue side.
Two teams (6225 and 5889) used near-identical ropes. One rope got stuck on the touchpad during deploy, and the other robot wasn’t functional for some reason but their rope deployed. The driving robot had acquisition and was starting to climb at the buzzer–defense slowed them through the neutral zone. You’ll see it at the center davit in the video. (Far side is where the rope got stuck.)
Like Gary, I didn’t see a single team climb the field rope. Several had it out, nobody went up.
That’s awesome. Reminds me of the medieval device used at the end of Braveheart.
During one of our practice matches at MSC this year the EngiNerds used our velcro-friendly rope which if I remember correctly is in part because our robot was having problems. All in good fun.
In one match on Curie, The designated rope guy on our drive team forgot to bring a rope. Luckily, 1086 (if I remember correctly) was kind enough to let us borrow theirs, and we successfully climbed with it.
At NYC this happened several times.
2791 ended up picking a team in the second round that should have been picked way earlier than they were. The reason some teams passed up on them was that their climb success rate was relatively low, something on the order of 65 percent. When we looked into why that was, it turns out in two consecutive matches, another team climbed their rope!
While it was unfortunate for them in quals, in elims they had a 100% climb rate, probably because everyone on the alliance climbed their own ropes. 
4534 accidentally climbed our rope instead of their’s and we went and climbed their’s in this match. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any video of it, though honestly the video would just look like two robots climbing white ropes. Though our robot does look a bit confused when someone else starts going up our spot 
We used 624’s spare rope in elims because it worked better for us than our rope.
1836 climbed 5499’s rope a few times on the practice field right before elims at the Idaho Regional. Turns out it worked so much better that we copied their rope (and made 10 more) for champs! Our initial prototypes climbed the field rope pretty effectively (although unknotted so it was not actually the field rope), and was designed based off this:
We even 3d printed copies of those exact wheels with a 3/8" hex bore for testing, but our other designs with velcro/combs proved more consistent and faster towards day 4/5 of build season.
