My team (4183) has been having trouble deciding if we want to make our robot able to pick up Frisbees and if we want to how can we easily pick them up and deposit them in our shooter.
any ideas?
That plunger and racket idea looked pretty good to me…
On a more serious note, one idea we had was using a dustpan-like mechanism to get under the frisbees and flip them into our hopper.
the simplest solution i could think of was to pick them up like you’d pick up a basketball. just use rollers to suck it up.
But than how would you put them into your shooter?
a conveyor or elevator system that rolls them up and straight into the shooter or hopper.
That’s the easy part. The hard part is determining which way they are facing, and then how to flip them.
I think that picking up the frisbees is going to be a waste of time. There’s a pretty small number sitting on the field, and the main way to get most of the frisbee’s is through the feeding station.
However, I was thinking of a conveyer system which would have a little hatch open. Above the hatch would be a suction cup on a piston. It would go down, pick up the frisbee, then deposit it on the conveyer belt. Simple and fast. Doesn’t solve the upside down issue though…
One solution is simply to ignore the upside down discs and just go for the ones that are right side up.
On that note, however, does the manual explicitly state that the discs on the field at the beginning of the match are face up? I assume so, but I can’t find a specific rule.
I think it’s quite possible to build a launcher that will toss discs equally well when they’re upside down as right side up, or near enough that there isn’t a noticeable difference at the type of ranges you might see in this game. I’ve heard a human throw type called the “Hammer” or the “Tomahawk”; it goes from vertical to inverted in flight and stays inverted. It also travels a fair ways, if thrown correctly.
I was wondering…Would it be completely legal to back up against the deposit slots and have them land in a hopper right away?
yep
Sure.
I don’t see a problem with that…I was going to suggest that to my team, anyway…
Perhaps have a toilet plunger end on a pneumatic arm come down and stick on the disc and then pull it back up. On the way up, the disc would hit a mechanical stop and fall of the plunger into a ramp or hopper.
I’m not so sure a toilet plunger would work so well…for one thing, the suction isn’t actually that great. The hard rubber pretty much prevents that. I think the best thing is to just use a dustpan-ish mechanicsmand drive around with that.
You could in terms just build an arm that has a tray of sorts and just dumps 3 at a time?
a cool plunger pickup system
Although I agree that we’re going to see the feeding slots used more than ever in the past few years, picking up discs from the field will be a HUGE advantage, because it’s actually something that not all the teams will be able to do, nevertheless do it well. There will be quite a few discs lying around the field from missed shots, I imagine.
I think it’s quite possible to build a launcher that will toss discs equally well when they’re upside down as right side up, or near enough that there isn’t a noticeable difference at the type of ranges you might see in this game. I’ve heard a human throw type called the “Hammer” or the “Tomahawk”; it goes from vertical to inverted in flight and stays inverted. It also travels a fair ways, if thrown correctly.
I addressed this in another post, but if you’re planning to throw the disc with any resemblance of accuracy over any distance greater than, say, 3ft, you’re going to have to do it the way it was intended: right side up, and with spin. I guarantee you we will see 0 robots that emulate the human throw called the hammer. A hammer is hard for a human, it’d be even harder for a robot. (Source: ultimate player)
Or have an arm, so that you can extend and just release?
Seems to me that if you got it going good enough, an upside down discs does nearly as well.
- Sunny G.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you’re wrong on this point.