Precision Guessworks - Coming to St. Louis, Boilermaker, and Atlanta.
Here’s a picture that shows how our shell and ramp systems look when they are deployed - a robot will be able to drive on top of our frame and a second one can follow up behind it and stay on top of our shell.
This bot looks “hot”. The ramp looks awesome, thats a great use for your covers.
whats the material on the covers??
Looks interesting. Is the ramp and such just a shell that the robot can pull out of to enable more real estate?
The covers are just thin lexan that has been spray painted by the students on the reverse side to reduce the amount of it scraping away.
The ramp is deployed by the fisher price gearbox on our arm - if you look closely, you’ll see a box going around the banebots motor that controls our gripper. This is actually a servo that rotates a piece 90 degrees and allows us to make contact with our ramps and deploy them. We then unlock our shell with another servo, and simply drive out of it - no additional motors required.
Maaaan… this is a neat-o design. I bet that not too many teams thought of this way to do a ramp. I’m looking forward to seeing this one at a competition soon. Kudos to Precision Guessworks!
Andy B.
It would be a lot of fun to come up with marketing ideas for the robot and your team as well. Good stuff.
Good luck this season.
Jane
wow really nice this saves you guys a good amount of weight plus i cant really tell but u guys can have an arm too lol
double loader +arm = good robot
Wow! That’s a really neat idea!
I’m looking forward to seeing it at Boilermaker!
Thanks Andy and everyone. The kids and college mentors had a lot of fun trying to think of something out of the box. In case you’re afraid of climbing up our ramps - fear not, we are planning to add some sort of track to the outside of the ramp on Thursday at St. Louis to prevent robots from running off the outside edges. Around 22 degrees on the ramp angle, so not as bad as last year’s ramp at least.
The main thing the kids wanted was an overall theme this year though, incorporating the robot, cart, and pit. We don’t have our official gripper on in that picture, but it’s a water jet cut dragon head and looks very sharp. The flames only accompany it as it sits on top of the cart resembling a castle.
See you all at St. Louis 
Ya, this is the year of the dragon…
does the shell completely detach from the robot?
i’m pretty sure that is against the rules for it to completely detach (unsure of which rule though)
The rule is <G40>
If they do detach, it could be easily fixed by tying a string to the shell. I don’t think it would be an entanglement issue since robots are unlikely to interact with it inside the shell.
The shell is attached to the robot via some aviation cable, and actually I think we’ve build a small lip on that end to ensure it doesn’t just slide off.
very nice looking robot, i like the ramp idea. good job
That’s too bad - it would have been awesome to see this robot “come out of its shell” and climb up its own ramp at the end of the match to score the elevation points… though I guess the shell would still count as being part of the robot.
I like the out-of-the-box thinking!
Are you planning on using bumpers?
It might be difficult to mount them but they could stiffen up the ramps with free weight.
Very Nice Robot. Cool Idea. Great Job 
Wait, this is one robot? Whoa. Impressive.
Yup, bumpers will be attached to three sides probably, we might figure out some way to attach it to the ramp side without interfering, guess we’ll see this Thursday :]
Thanks for all the comments and questions!