I’ve looked through the rules, and can’t find anything that says I can’t do this, but by no means does that mean I am misinterpreting something or simply not looking in the right spot.
The idea:
Our robot will be using a articulated arm. We intend to use potentiometers to get the angle of each joint, and use information from said sensors to build preset configurations to easily place the tubes at certain peg levels. But we would still have a manual system just in case.
My idea for a manual control system is to build a miniature arm. This arm would be a scale model of the one on the robot. The mini arm would be equipped with potentiometers just like the full scale arm. Thus, when the miniarm is moved by a driver, the full scale will move to match.
If legal, the mini arm will be placed on a scale robot as a reference point, so that we don’t accidentally smash the real arm into ourselves or the floor.
Is a miniarm control system legal?
you can pretty much do whatever you want with the driver control system. This has been done before, and appeared to work well. Can’t recall the team-done many years ago.
I would suggest Q&A on this, really this is a case of innovative ingenuity, and I really don’t see a reason they would decline the use of this unless they had a real good reason. Make sure to say everything you can. It makes the ruling that much more likely to give you the answer on this.
If it follows all the rules for control systems, it would be legal. Nothing that you mentioned would make it illegal.
The practicality of that control system is another issue, but I’m not an expert in control systems, so do what your team thinks is best.
That kind of system has been attempted in the past by some teams. I think our team tried something like that for Rack n’ Roll (2007) which didn’t work so well, but another team supposedly did that effectively and won the <Corporate Sponsor Name> Control Award at Peachtree.
EDIT: The award was the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award.
I am not sure which team it was, but back in either 1999 or 2000 some team built a strap on arm that did basically this. One of the drivers strapped it to his arm and the arm on the bot moved as his arm did.
We basically did the same exact thing for our 2007 robot. It was a scale arm built out of polycarbonate with potentiometers at the 3 joints for manual control. This is probably the most intuitive way to control a multi-jointed arm, but we have decided to never make an arm like that again. The arm itself performed great, but it was way too complex for the drivers to control during the heat of the moment. If you have decided to go with a multi-joint arm, I wish you the best of luck, but you might want to evaluate its practicality.
I would code the arm to not destroy the robot rather than hoping the driver doesn’t move the arm wrong. Additionally, what if the mini-arm bends such that , although the position seems safe on the model, it isn’t.
Our team was actually going to try something like this if we had time, but more of an arm-mounted thingamabob. We were going to take apart a joystick (we had some extra ones) so we didn’t have to mess with getting the data to the robot.
Like others said, there should be nothing wrong with this. The only restriction I saw that dealt with robot-control is that the driver station is the only valid means of interacting with the robot.
The team I used to be on (308) did this in 2000. When I went to team 65 we did it in 2005. It works very well and is highly intuitive for the drivers. Good luck.
you can pretty much do whatever you want with the driver control system. This has been done before, and appeared to work well. Can’t recall the team-done many years ago.