I remember seeing a thread that looked like this last year, so I’ll post a new one since it was very interesting in 2017. This year didn’t have too much in the way of robot diversity, but the creative ideas were really mind-blowing.
I’ll start by mentioning one of the obvious ones - 5026’s manipulator grabbed the cubes by pinching their covers, and their elevator was one continuous belt which flipped up at the start of the match - blew me away at SFR.
3598 had a pretty interesting pivoting mechanism.
195’s climber is pretty amazing. The release of the hook delivery mechanism pushes out the forks on its way up, allowing the hook delivery, fork release, and climb all to be powered by the same set of motors.
4678’s climb mechanism. Their robot is a double jointed arm/claw and when it goes to climb its arm reaches down, grabs the winch cable from out of the robot’s “knee” and deposits it on the rung. I just about fell out of my chair the first time I saw it in action.
I am a fan of 4967’s “Bam-Bam” arm.
2152’s auto cube pickup, they used a Jetson and a LiDAR to autonomously acquire a cube in teleop.
The original buddy lift on 125 was pretty wild.
2056’s “bent” elevator is a neat touch that a lot of people seem to miss. It allows the hooks to reach the bar and makes scoring cleaner. The whole elevator is slanted by a couple degrees. Not something I would normally think of doing.
4039’s scale mechanism - they rarely used it but it grabbed cubes off the top of their robot that were picked up from the portal - reminded me of 971’s 2016 shooter.
Also 2013’s intake mechanism - nothing extended over the bumpers and they had to drive into cubes to lift them with their elevator. Despite this, they were still finalists at provincial champs and their division.
My favorite that I’ve seen in person has to be 5818’s intake flaps and drivetrain.
For those who don’t know 5818 used ~1-1.5 foot squares of thin rubber in place of intake wheels on thier robot this year, thus the name: Floptimous Prime. Because they are using a CIM to drive each flap mounted at the front ends of thier robot, they had to move their front wheels in board by a few inches which I didn’t know until closer inspection.
Last fun fact, they are using 11 CIMS on Floptimous Prime which blew me away!
Can I just throw our robot into the mix since I never personally saw another robot use the same idea?
We used jackscrews in a tube-in-tube system on the lower half of our arm to climb. This system proved to be slow but powerful, so we removed it and used a lock bar that we would knock out of place to allow the same winch that rotated the arm to pull the whole upper arm into the lower half. That brought our climbing from about 10 seconds to sub 2 seconds.
As I said, I didn’t hear of any robot using the same idea, so sorry if this was a common idea haha.
I actually thought that our sperated intake on its very own elavator was quite a neat system that ended up working out very well.
The intake is basically two identical but mirror imaged elavators linked together by a chain run so that it acts as a single elavator.
4276 had an incredibly unique intake. Cudos to the designers that came up with such a solid mechanism!
I’ll add ours to the group.
We used an arm and had a horizontal roller intake which pocketed the cubes meaning we never dropped one.
Ladders are pretty rare. The last one I recall seeing before that was on 1098 at the 2003 St. Louis Regional. They used a wooden stepladder to add plowing height, on a robot that was otherwise just an effective drive train. IIRC (old records are hazy), they were the #1 seed.