Just curious, since there were only two suckers at the local scrimmage this weekend, how many teams are using some sort of vacuum apparatus to acquire and/or hold the ball? and if you do, how do you hurdle? (shoot or lift over) ours grabs with a vacuum funnel, and shoots the ball over with pneumatics:
Ours is a lifter, which we hope will get the trackball close and slightly above the trellis, release the vacuum and have the trackball sort of tumble over it. But we hope to be able to pick it up near the end of the match and simply place it on the trellis. The vacuum is both strong and allows us to have very good control of the trackball.
After we sucked figuratively much less than literally last year, never again… have you tested your “sucker” with the ball being bumped, or in a less-than-optimal orientation to the robot? Those were our big problems last year…
We have tested the strength extensively. Basically there is no way to knock the ball off with any hit we could inflict to the ball. We tried kicking it slamming it into the ground hitting it repeatedly (I’m pretty strong) and every other way imaginable and the ball won’t come off. We hold the ball with 360 lbs of suction so needless to say we’re not worried about losing the ball. I would go so far to say that are gripper is probably one of the most secure ones. Additionally we can acquire the ball just by touching it, ,we don’t have to press on to it for an extended amount of time.
Exactly. Also to take care of the vertical orientation we are using both a potentiometer and reed switches to tell us exactly the right height to pick up the ball.
