Team 3750’s (ERROR 404’s) 2009 FIRST Tech Challenge Robot “Chicapus”
This looks like a very clean robot, can you give some examples of what it does ie. low goal, high goal, how it opens the chutes?
Great looking robot
Clean is the last word I would have thought some one would have described it as. Honestly I don’t know how we did so well at Clarkson (2nd place) with a robot that only scores in the low goal. Also it makes this loud clanging sound from the zipties hit the metal guide on the inside. I’ll try to get some video up soon, but for now this is the basic overview.
Holonomic drive: 2 forward facing powered wheels in front and 2 unpowered perpendicular omni wheels in the back
Rotating shaft on the inside has zipties all around it that pick up the balls and bring them to the hopper at the top.
Two independently servo driven door flaps allow the balls to dribble out when opened.
Tomorrow we have a meeting so I’ll be able to get more detailed pictures and some video of it in action.
Easy. Others teams tried for the other goals and didn’t make it, perhaps mistaking their ability to make a viable scorer. Your team on the other hand, for whatever reason, decided that the point gap is easily closed with a few low goal balls and defense. There were many scores in the first VA qualifier that had combined scores of less than 5. Dumping 4 balls in autonomous would have very easily won 1/2 the matches. This was easily the most surprising aspect of this game.
With the ever-evolving cat and mouse strategies in this game, I fully expect that low goal bots will be contenders to help win the elims in Atlanta. Those bots will need good autonomouses, good defensive capabilities, and smart drivers. I don’t believe there will be low-goal powerhouses since defense is difficult to perfect and there’s very limited low-goal space. Yet bots who are great at scoring the outer goals have a definite ally with most low-goal designs since most low goal bots can also act as defense, wingman, and a second hopper to a outer-goal powerhouse.
Actually until four days before competition we were one of those teams trying to score in the high goals, but having little success, so we made the decision that we could do just as well if not better, as we did, if we just go simple and score in the low goal. So we scrapped our robot threw in some extra hours (all of our study halls and any class we could beg our way out of) and got this done. In the end I couldn’t be happier with it.
In all honesty, I really doubt this. If descoring weren’t allowed, it could nicely tie up all of the balls faster than other goals, but low goal spitters could potentially just have whatever they tried to score immediately taken away by the opponent, essentially handing them point opportunities.
I think it’s about as viable as a pure defense robot in Lunacy; can work at regionals with strong partners, won’t at the Championship.
True Chris, that descoring is a potential issue. Yet a descoring mechanism is an additional feature that adds complexity to a design and takes away precious time in other areas of the field during a game. Thus, I’m not worried too much about descoring.
Right now there are more pictures if you go into my media that show some more detail of the robot if you have any questions about them just ask, but have the name of the picture your refering to.
I should have the pictures in the thread tonight.
Here are the rest of the pictures
I think you may be misunderstanding what it means to have a holonomic drive. Unless I am missing something while looking at these photos, your robot is 2WD with casters, effectively.
“Holonomic” implies the ability to instantly move in any direction along a plane.
I’m sorry about that, I actually just had this discussion with Greg Needel and yea it’s not holonomic, as a freshmen one of the older students introduced this to me as holonomic.