I was just wondering if there were any teams making an intake using only rollers. These are polycarb tubes capped off with hdpe with rubber tubing on them.
If your team did consider this, what were the con’s that made you turn it down? Just trying to get some info, thanks.
First con that comes to mind is weight. Conveyor belts give the same, possibly better, functionality with less rollers, bearing, chain, etc.
I’m sure for some teams this design may be more feasible to fabricate, lathing out groves in pipe for round belting is a bit of a challenge…
Too many moving parts.
Yeah we were thinking about the same design. Were not positive what were doing yet, the drawing looks great.
We originally tried a variant of this with a twist - the rollers would be spin at increasing rates to accelerate the balls. It was a cute idea, but never produced a fully working prototype since we decided that a) it would be heavy, and b) more moving parts = more likely to fail.
Good luck!
We used a similar approach on our robot with 6 rollers (3/4" PVC tube with 2.5" pool noodles).
We use the pvc as a shaft and attach plastic #25 sprockets between each endcap on the pvc. We have tested this collector mechanism for 1 week without any significant failures in the rollers.
For most teams without polycord, this is a simple workable solution.
Check out our video or gallery. We should be putting up a video of our robot collecting 20 balls and then dumping them in 20 seconds !
No we didn’t decide to do this, it wasn’t even really considered b/c it wouldn’t have worked with our design.
But I would like to know what kind of rubber those “rubber tubes” are, both Akash’s and the Disco-bot’s.
We are going to have an intake roller, and slipping a rubber tube over it for traction sounds like a really elegant solution (as opposed to wraping neoprene whether stripping around it :rolleyes:)
Have you looked into Plasti Dip spray rubber coating?
https://www.hardtofinditems.com/images/W/plasti_dip_spray_red_product_image.jpg
they have it at a local Sutherlands store
Again this isn’t a design we’re using.
The rubber that we used last year on our bot’s rollers was actually the lining of a rubber innertube. We had just enough at a mentor’s house to use and it worked perfectly.
Our team is using a variant of this, which allows for using less rollers to ascend to the top, and also allows the roller system to double as ball storage (without any “hopper”, we can hold around 20-25 orbit balls). In fact, we’ve managed to get the rollers to do everything manipulative on the bot, without any major modifications to the roller system at any point (that is, it’s almost symmetrical over a horizontal line through the middle).
We’ll post some pictures once we have a 'bot up and running, which hopefully won’t be too much longer.
The black mat we use is drawer liner from Wal-mart. We use zip ties to squeeze the black mat around a pool noodle.
If we encounter a ball jam the noodle will eventually slip on the 3/4" pvc rod preventing the #25 chain from skipping or stalling the motor.
Check out our gallery for more details, http://2009.discobots.org/node/34
We’re using black mat from Walmart too, on our helix drive. We have flaps of it sticking out, brushing the balls up the helix. Kind of hard to see in the video because it’s on black ABS pipe.
