Hi all,
At the Kickoff, it seemed that First was sort of encouraging teams to try and build a robot that could pick up and throw a ball into the goal.
To my knowledge, only a handful of teams (including ours) attempted to do this with any success. While collecting a ton of balls quickly like all the great ball collectors/dumpers mentioned elsewhere was probably the best way to go to win the competition with a ball machine, having a machine that could shoot balls seemed like a cool and fun idea.
Our machine (Team 368) scoops up about 7 balls (with or without the goal), loads them in a rack, stores them, and launches them one at a time into the goal via a self loading catapult (Sort of like the Sunny D machine of years past). Basically we made a short range catapult that could be used either attached to a goal or not. We had some difficulties with it, but for the most part we held our own and could deliver most of the balls that we picked up fairing pretty well in the two regionals and the championships. I think the most balls we ever picked up and launched in to the goal during competition was about 18 (Not nearly what the good ball collectors/dumpers could do, but still respectful).
I really didn’t get a chance to check out every robot at the competitions we went to, so my question is, who else made a ball throwing machine, was it successful, and finally which ball throwing machine did you like the best. Pictures anyone?
We (Team 356) built a ball shooter. I worked quite well. We could shoot properly inflated balls into a goal from about 10 - 12 feet away. We shot some over-inflated ones as much as 20 - 25 feet! We had about a 75% success rate at scoring balls during matches.
Unfortunately we just didn’t get to use it very much. Positioning goals, defending goals, and blocking basket bots was almost always a higher priority than shooting balls. Things may have been different if our ball collector were a bit faster. As it turned out it took us several seconds to deliver a ball to the shooter once it entered the collection mechanism. At most we probably could have scored 6 - 8 balls if that were all we tried to do in our two minutes.
I think that if we’d had a faster ball collector, we could have given some of the best basket bots a real run for their money, delivering 15 - 20 balls per match. After all, they have to get to the goal to score where we can score from a distance. We hope to have this fix in place in time for Baxter’s Ozark Mountain Brawl this summer.
Here’s a picture…
http://theduchy.ualr.edu/first/2002/houston.team.pic.2002.jpg
-Joel
I know team 296 had a ball shooter…I don’t know how well they did with accuracy though…
our teachers liked 368’s ball shooter. A lot. My opinion…it was slower than most, but prob. the most accurate ball shooter i got to see. kudos.
I thought you deserved a “Quality Award” for your 6-sigma delivery. If your robot was properly positioned and stationary, I never saw you miss. The delivery “sweet spot” could have been a little farther away, did the new cam help?
356 had one…they were next to us in Nats and Texas…
Hi Amy & Chris,
Thanks for your kind words towards are little catapult machine. I agree our machine could not compete with the sheer volume of balls that the best ball collector/dumpers could deliver. I guess we always knew that this could be a problem. Perhaps not the smartest move to play the game, but we really wanted to see if we could make something launch a ball into the air. We also thought that if we made a shooter with some sort of storage to launch on demand, we would have the option of running to any goal we wanted whether it was ours or not, place a couple of balls into it and try to max out the score rather than dump whatever we had all at one time. This strategy didn’t quite work out the way we intended as we had a hard time tracking the number of balls in play and actually won a few matches for our oponents.
Thank you very much for graciously making that indexing cam for us. When we arrived in San Jose, our machine was basically untested and we spent the whole day wiring the machine missing all our practices. By the time we had everything working, we realized that we could not shoot balls as quick as we would like to because our indexing cam did not have enough dwell time to permit us to %%%% the catapult quickly. In LA, we put in the new cam and it definitely improved our reliability. Where it really made the difference, was at the Championships. Finally having some time to reprogram the machine, we were able to retune the machine so that it could fire a ball every 1.5 seconds (a big difference from San Jose). This definitely helped us earn enough QP to get in to the elimination rounds and we have your team to thank for a big part of it!
By tweaking the machine and completing the installation of some small items such as the cam, a switch to automate our grabbing mechanism, and new traction belts (Thanks Glenn and George from Team 60 for the advice!) our robot performed very differently and became much more competitive at the Championships than it was at any of the regionals.
I again just want to say thank you to Team 330 and Team 60 for all your help. We may not be regional champions, but we certainly had fun trying (Besides, we finally found a practical after competition use for our machine. It seems that our pneumatic goal grabber makes an awesome coconut cracker! I think we’ll bring our machine down to Waikiki crack coconuts with our machine and sell them to the Tourist. If we make enough, maybe we can go to Orlando again 
We poped balls into the goal. And how fast u ask? As fast as u can feed them. and got about 17 out of 20 balls in the basket, while moving!!!