Passive gear funnel rejects fuel. Also can handle either a soft delivery or a “fast ball” delivered by nervous human players.
Active gear placement all the way to the back of the peg, over fuel if necessary.
Under 1 second rope acquisition and under 1 second climb. Acquisition courtesy of a 3D printed auger that carries the rope to the contact pad. 3 775s reduced approximately 30:1 bring us to the touchpad in under 1 second.
Orlando Regional champion (thanks to 4481, Team Rembrandts, and 1744, Robo Rays)
Attending Rocket City Regional and Houston Championship
Congrats on the win guys. Your bot this year was truly world class and watching it zip up and down the field and rope left me in awe.
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you manage you climb given that it is so fast. Is it purely driver intuition as to when you stop climbing or are you using sensors or current monitoring to know when to stop?
It’s mostly on me to stop the robot during a climb. However, there is also a limit switch to stop it just in case. A lot of the climbing in Orlando was manually stopped, I’ve only broken a few touchpads :D.
Do you use low gear to accelerate before shifting into high gear, or do you mainly stay in high gear but shift into low gear for situations like dealing with defense or pushing dead robots out of the way?
Top speed in high gear is 14 fps, in low gear it’s around 7-8ish. We have the robot default to low gear and I have to hold a button to shift into high gear. Usually we use low gear to accelerate into high gear as well as for pushing and lining up for both gear acquisition and placement. However, while getting from place to place it’s almost always in high gear.
Do you mind describing how your gear mechanism scores the gear in more detail? Particularly how it has the capability to score the gear to the back of the peg, and over fuel.
As usual, an incredible robot! I enjoyed watching your playoff matches at Orlando!
The gear is held in the mechanism in the front as shown and in the back by similar, longer fingers. The rear fingers are curved to allow for a smoother release. When actuated, they extend to the edge of the bumper. Under normal operation, this forces the gear all the way to the back of the peg. The peg can still engage the gear with fuel in the way, and the mechanism gives the gear enough momentum to slide to the back of the peg.
Once a gear is inside of our robot it is held in place by 2 pneumatically actuated hands. When we come up to the peg we use the hands to push the gear all the way to the back of the peg, removing any worry about whether the gear will fall on the way up. Because of this we don’t need to be very far on to the peg in order to score. For example if there were fuel under the peg keeping us from getting as far on it as we generally do we still wouldn’t have to worry about scoring the gear as it would be pushed to the back of the peg. Hope I answered your question!
