How many of you have taken time to figure out what you are going to do if there is a row of fuel in front of the lift you are trying to deliver you gear to?
Have you designed your bot to “reach out” to the bumper perimeter or some other method to defeat these pesky fuel in your way?
I assume for a decent amount of teams, that mechanism is called an “intake”.
I expect a lot of teams will just drive into the balls and mash them into the wall. They’re soft, deform easily, and seem to pop back into shape.
Spring is 10.5 inches, ball is 5, bumpers are 3.25, still gives you 1.75 inches of space… Seems more than enough if you thought about your robots design…
Engage Ramming speed!
In all seriousness… that’s usually the solution to a lot of issues in FIRST :D. My only worry there is that you might end up on top of some of the balls. For a lot of robots with low bumpers that will spend the end of movement.
If it gets particularly bad I’m sure a run or two with the intake will clean it up.
The gear is what, 2 inches thick? And the spring may deform / drop the gear if only partially placed on the peg. Can still probably “just” crush the ball though.
Shove it on. Firmly. With authority. And don’t miss.
Dropping the gear there creates a (much) more serious problem.
Fuel in front of the lift and the droopy springs caused us to change from a passive hanger to a system with a door and a system to push the gear out so that it is ~8-10" beyond the frame perimeter.
Even so, we’re working on some spin moves to see if that clears the fuel both at the lift and the intake. Our robot is about 4" wider than it is long, and will have a gap in the bumpers front and back.
Balls in front of the lift (and the loading stations) were part of our design from the beginning. We plan to do like Richard Wallace suggests.
Just don’t shoot the gear onto the peg. Shooting gears is against the rules.
I didn’t see anything about Shooting. But LAUNCHING is right out.
We popped our prototype gear handler and ball intake onto an old chassis with bumpers and dumped a hoppers worth of fuel right around our airship. It was very helpful to check this early on. We learned that fuel in front of the airship isn’t much of a problem to begin with, and definitely not with an intake system. Even without the intake, fuel like to move out of the way, and if they don’t, a quick twitch of the controls clears them.
We also learned that a fuel will deform substantially from getting caught between bumpers and airship/wall. We used a few of those deformed fuel in our high goal prototype and learned they can be a problem. They pop back out eventually, though.
In our testing, fuel by itself doesn’t impact the placement of the gear. A gear almost definitely will impact reliability of placement.
Fuel likes to smush together 2-deep when against the wall, creating about 6" of gap between bumpers and the wall. However, the lift edge is 2-4" (can’t remember) from the wall of the airship. On top of that the peg extends 10" out from there (or 9" if the tip is broken). So the peg reaches far enough that it’s a few inches inside the frame perimeter in nearly all cases. This is completely moot if there is a gap in the bumpers since that’s an extra 3" gap the robot can close to the wall.
However, if there is a gear in the way in addition to the balls – good luck with that ;). Average-case in our testing of that scenario, the bumpers were 12" away from a solid wall. This means that the frame perimeter can be approximately at the exact edge of the tip of the peg - meaning the peg doesn’t engage the gear at all in most designs. A gap in the bumpers mitigates it somewhat, but only if the gear being placed is at the absolute front of the bot. If the tip of the peg is broken, all bets are off, IMO.
I expect there to be a few pieces of fuel in front of all of the lifts most of the time. If human players have to dump a load of balls on the field without a bot at the station, the balls are naturally propelled towards one of the lifts. Missed shots to the boiler will cause a few balls to go in front of the other two. The natural match flow to/from the boiler & feeder station will likely push some of them right next to the lift itself.
I expect plenty of teams in early matches to drop their autonomous gear in autonomous since it ‘missed’. Once autonomous routines are dialed in, this won’t be much of a problem.
Have you not thought about… using another lift?
I’m quite sure the plan will be to sweep them away with the corner of the bot if brute force doesn’t work and it becomes a problem (swerve in field orientation). If a gear is there we’ll pick it up and place it.
But then you might have the problem of two robots attempting to be in the same place at the same time. Better to take this into account and design your robot for this and just deal with the fact that there will be fuel in the way.
We can extend our gear-scoring mechanism out 5in. It was undesirable to combine the intake and gear handling on the same side of the robot from our perspective.
What about projecting? Compelling to move rapidly through the air?
… thesaurus is this year’s chute door.
I never yell at my drivers. I articulate with emphasis.
or discuss loudly?