Looks like a beast. Can’t wait to see it in action!
Are you going to be at IRI to watch I’m guessing?
Unfortunately, no. I’ll be traveling. I hope to watch the livestream from Israel, though!
well, safe travels!
Care to share how many koala this can score?
Edit: Kpa
T; koala=T.
Lol nice autocorrect there.
But in a hybrid cycle (2 gears and shooting) we can shoot around a total of 170 balls in a match and score around 110 to 120 so about a 65% shot accuracy.
Dang son!
Heres a couple instances of it in action.
I really like the mecanum roller feeding system. Can you share a little bit about how it works? (What challenges came with it, any cad drawings for it, etc?)
It’s known as a vectored intake wheel in this application, and we did a couple of quick post-season experiments after Stronghold. These wheels automatically center the balls so they can come in through a smaller gap than the width of the intake. The wheels push objects in a direction parallel to the rollers in contact with the object, so for a floor intake, you want the rollers to look like a V pointing in when viewed from below, or like a V pointing out when viewed from above. As you can see in these pictures, in the center, there are usually a few solid rollers of the same or **slightly **smaller diameter to do the actual intake. [Edit: If the normal rollers are compliant, you would want to make them somewhat larger than the vectored wheels.]
If you are taking 5" balls into a 12" gap but want a 30" wide intake, you would likely only put the vectored wheels on the outside 9" of each side, and normal roller wheels in the middle 12".
[Edit answering Kevin’s question]: We did not use it in competition (outside our frame perimeter), but we had no difficulties using the vectored wheels on an extended width version our intake, as long as we had the bumpers to back up the intake and keep the ball rolling along the shaft. Note that this was with the compliant boulder for Stronghold, not the stiffer fuel used in STEAMworks.
Right, I understand the usage of mecanum wheels in this application, but I was asking for exactly how it worked for them and what challenges they faced.
Understanding how a system works isn’t the same as having actually built it. A ton of teams this year had roller feeder systems that didn’t work nearly as well as 2056’s, even though they had the same basic principle, for example.
Well, it actually works amazingly better than I originally thought it would through our prototype designs of it. what we did is had the wheels pull towards the center to a model racecar wheel which has rubber on the outside and had a foam lining to give it cushion (same wheel as used in the shooter for a flywheel). our first problem came when we started getting ball jams just about any motor would stall out that we used due to the compression we used so to fix the jamming where two balls would center over the uptake chute we staggered the Lexan faces that the wheel ride against as they move towards the center. staggering the plates by half an inch made the difference, it provided the balls intake preference the balls set back had preference over the balls set forward.
we also played with gear ratios for awhile on the full CIM motor driving the transfer because of the brownout problems when the motor stalled. the motor would stall easily with even a slight jam due to the fact that the Axel alone weighs 10lbs with the mech nums.
Overall we’ve found it very reliable and it turned out much better than expected. and from the robots we’ve competed with and against this is the only one I’ve seen that uses mech nums to transfer and organize balls around in the robot. and as video evidence proves we can surely process a huge amount of fuel easily each match.
If you would like a video of the system working we will have the robot back together by tomorrow just let me know.
That would be awesome. Thanks for the information.
For context, we had three different setups for feeding balls into our shooter throughout build/competition season, and we couldn’t find one that was as simple and elegant and effective as we wanted it to be. This seems to fit that bill, and the information on optimizing it and keeping it from stalling was really useful. Thanks!
Its is very unique and works well but there is the drawback of power usage and weight so keep that in mind. and I’m not sure on when my team will be releasing CAD so I don’t know what to tell you about that. but I will try to get a video today of the full system and post it on our youtube.
I’ll post the link in the thread as well.
Here is a video of the System in action.
https://youtu.be/_NRIrHLWTfE
This on picture looks awesome
Thanks!