An established, medium resource team with no technical mentors (other than myself who is more of an advisor since I am still in college and can only be loosely involved via telecommunications) I am helping to mentor is considering doing a double virtual 4 reverse bar mechanism mounted on an elevator for their superstructure. I was pushing for them to do a horizontal linear extension (basically an elevator mounted parallel to the ground). Their stated cons of that design are that doing a horizontal elevator requires two extensions for reaching the high node and at that point trying to cheaply make a horizontal elevator is going to have more play than a DRV4B. Another argument they had was that the DRV4B could serve as a passthrough in the robot allowing them to score off of both sides of the robot.
I strongly disagree with that sentiment given my experience making a vertical DR4B for 2018. I am picturing a super floppy, top heavy mechanism that will have a difficult time being precise especially with any practical end effector attached to it.
I was originally advocating for them to do a 971 2018 style double arm robot because its super light, only has 2 dof, and allows for scoring off either side of the robot and intaking from both loading stations.
Their primary arguments against that design is that they are concerned about not being able to execute as well as 971 due to its complexity with I can totally understand since 971 is one of the GOATs. My thoughts on that are that 971 has published their CAD from that year and has detailed video reviews of their designs on youtube that will be extraordinarily valuable. Essentially I think that reproducing an existing, proven, public design will be easier to do than trying to do a completely novel (as far as I can tell because I haven’t found any examples of a robot like this done in the past which I would argue is another good reason why its not the best plan of attack because either the team has come up with a novel idea that noone has ever done in FIRST or people have tried that and deemed that it was not as good as other designs) arguably more complicated design.
I wanted to hear thoughts from the community about this, so I’d appreciate any feedback!
I also wanted to say that I understand that my role as a mentor is to enable the students, not direct them. Ultimately if the students decide to do this, I will try my best to help them make the most Bad*** Horizontal DRV4B they can. But I also want to do what I can to poke them in a direction that I think would be more conducive to their success.