Hey, team 1523 (MARS) and I were thinking of having some type of universal hanging system. In other words, a system developed for robots to hang off of each other without worrying about dimension issues. It would greatly simplify the bonus and make it much easier to get those extra points at the end. Comments?
Good idea. Team 1334 has been toying with the idea of making the dimensions the same as the poles on the tower for simplicity’s sake.
From a strategy point of view, an EXCELLENT idea.
A suggestion: build it similar in dimension to the bars on the alliance station side of the towers. This will greatly simplify design processes, as everyone can find those dimensions and is hopefully figuring out if and how they can attach to them.
unfortunately that bar is pretty wide, and it may be hard to provide the full unobstructed length to give to other robots.
What area of free space should be left around the pipe? 4", 6"? if there is a simple standard hook design that is common, that could help choose this clearance.
Also, is it better to support robots with two clamps? 1 clamp in the middle? ideally, you give them as long a bar as possible, only held up on the two ends, but that still probably won’t take everyone’s mechanism.
Excellent idea, if you aim to attach to the bumpers i think that that would give you the most uniform fit between robots. That is where i would personally look.
Team 1261 will be keeping our rails at the same dimensions of the poles on the towers. We figure that if everyone is ready to hang off the towers, than they can just as easily hang off our rails.
- Sunny
Don’t hang off the bumpers! It’s usually not a good idea to lift using the bumpers; you definitely don’t want anyone hanging on them.
That is a little hard to imagine, consider you are going to have 3 robots hanging off on the same side of the tower.
One of the major point-scoring opportunities this year is hanging your robot off of another allied and elevated robot. To make the most of this scoring opportunity, it is important that, in as many matches as possible, there is a robot in your alliance which can either be suspended by your robot, or one which yours can suspend from.
In an effort to see that each design is “compatible” with as many potential allies as possible, we at Westwood believe that it would benefit everyone if we developed a standard: a certain model/style of robots suspending themselves from eachother that we can take advantage of in as many rounds as possible. If we pull this off, it will take much of the guess work out of pre-match planning on competition day; we will simply be able to say: “Who has the proper attachment point in place?” or “Who here can attach to the usual point?” and, chances are, the only thing remaining between us and those three points would be some fancy driving. 
Food for thought:
“All robots have a bar of square channel which, once the robot suspends itself, will be accessible from the back and approximately 4 feet from the ground. All robots wishing to be suspended from such robots must be able to attach to the bar and raise themselves to the required height.”
Wouldn’t the best standard bar to grab be one similar to the bar already on the field? Why not base a standard on that?
I don’t think attempts at standardization will work well simply because you’d have to grab more than one different kind of object. Making one’s grabber work on several surfaces is something that needs to be considered as a possible design choice, though, as the lack of standardization could force it.
Note: Merged two thread on this topic together and moved to a category.
Um, chris? I’m pretty sure that a standard would make a single system, so the robot would only have to grip one type of object. Your argument needs to be inverted.
I like the standards ideas, but I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to get everyone to go along with it.
Having a bar the same size as the one on the field is probably the best way to go. This way the only variation in attachment points is the height at which they are placed.
Sorry about that; I had searched for “Standardized” to make sure this hadn’t been done… Which obviously didn’t work.
We talked about this a lot on the drive back from Manchester. Another approach is for each robot to have a bar on top that is a handle allowing it to be lifted from above. I wondered if the kit bot that was shown at kickoff which had this type of bar was a hint. The advantage is that it would be easy for any robot to have the handle and not need a lifting mechanism. Even a simple goalie robot could be lifted if they can get to the hanger. The lifters on the other hand would need additional functionality.
My post’s wording sucked so I’ll edit it (tends to happen to me a lot) but I was basically saying making a standard mount based on something other than the field bar would not be advisable. If teams include a section of field-like bar on their robots, then existing grabbers can be adapted to it.
I fully agree that there should be some standardized hanging system identical (at least in size and shape) as the tower par.
Unfortunately, many teams will have a problem for this because of space. I see this getting in the way of pendulem type kickers (especially considering this changes the weight distribution)
Ideally, the bar would go across the middle of the robot, at hopefully two points. Any more than that and connecting is too difficult.
Also, if the connection is not perfectly balanced, Tipping will be an issue, and it may fall under the platform (20" if I’m not mistaken), and no points will be awarded for that extra robot.
Just some potential problems that need to be worked around for a standardized system.
The idea of making a robot capable of grabbing both the field’s bar and another robot’s is really good. Anyone who’s robot can’t lift itself for some reason should definitely go for that.
I do not think its a good idea to put the par on top of the robot, though you could raise the other robot (the one that is suspended off of your robot) higher, you would restrict the designs of many teams since, unless they come up with a way to raise and lock it into place, their robots will be too tall to fit in the tunnel. But we can make it so that the bar is at 18 inches, so the robot can fit through the tunnel, but I guarantee you if we do that someone will place their vital components near that bar (electronics, $1000 CRIO, etc) and which could get ripped out by another robot.
I just feel, in this case where we want to make wide sweeping standards, its a good idea to make it simple, so even a rookie team can install it w. out quams. So I think we should go back to hanging it at certain length from the ground (im thinking 5 inches) so it can act as a guard and the robot can use the tunnel as per their design. As our dear old friend Murphy says, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” So lets keep it simple, since I don’t want to see robots falling from 7 feet.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to link the robots together while they were still on the ground… and just have one robot do the lift?
Jason