I was wondering what fraction of teams have a robot that was constructed purely for community involvement or promotional events. Does your team have such a robot, or if not, what do you use for your promo events (e.g. T-Shirt cannon, robot from previous year, etc.)
254’s Shockwave T-Shirt Cannon is the only such robot I know of.
With inspiration from 254’s t-shirt cannon, we converted our 2010 robot into a t-shirt cannon. Upgrades for our cannon are coming this summer.
Miss Daisy 341 built 4 identical robots for community outreach and STEM education. http://www.team341.com/community/sparkys-robot-world/
We use robots from the previous year to demo at schools and community training courses we run on campus. We’re looking at building a robot specifically for this outreach purpose, designed such that we can run for extended periods of time without needing to swap batteries, since we usually allow students and guests to drive the robots around for a while.
We have a Recycle Rush garbage can that we put on wheels. The key features include a pneumatic piston to lift his lid, and an led light face that will change on a button press. We use him for PR events and he gets the attention of kids everywhere. These pictures are a little old, but he hasn’t changed any.
1339 has a mecanum drive base with a lounge chair on top that we built exclusively for demos.
See this recent thread for more examples.
You can find many more examples by searching for “air cannon” “t-shirt cannon”, “chair bot”, or “tote bot”.
I would hazard a guess that among teams with member(s) posting on CD, having some sort of promotional/demo/outreach robot is more common than not. Based on my knowledge of local teams, whether or not a team has an outreach robot seems to correlate well with how much work that team does between May and December.
Make a couch
'nuff said
We build a bell ringer every year around the holiday season. This most recent one was probably our best yet, being able to fit in a tote and having an LED strip.
We have a T-shirt shooter with an Nvidia board (I don’t remember which one) that holds up to two shirts at once (two chambers) and can launch them 200+ feet.
We just modified our 2016 robot to run from a quadcopter controller instead of a driver station. We also modified power usage, robot speed etc, so a single battery lasts about 3 hours instead of two minutes.
Very fun robot - kids can drive it, catch balls, go over defenses and other stuff.
Honestly I know 973 works miracles in your spare time so I can’t tell if you’re serious about the 3 hours of battery life or not. If you are, I would be REALLY interested in hearing how you managed to do that.
We use robots from past years. The BEST robots are particularly good at distributing flyers due to a basket on one and the claw on last year’s.
2761 built a t-shirt cannon (could use some improvements) that we’ve been able to take to college and high school events. We find that the public honestly doesn’t care about the technicalities of our robots - they care about the flashiness. The reactions we’ve gotten to it was great. The LEDs and blue and black finish were a real crowdpleaser. We’ve also used tiretrains and chairbots as tools for both training members over the offseason and integrating the community into our events.