One of the ideas my team is currently considering is using a turret to allow us to easily auto-align our outtake mechanism with the high goal without having to rotate the robot. We are going to use a West Coast Drivetrain. What are the pros and cons of using a turret? What challenges are there with using a turret that you wouldn’t expect to encounter if you haven’t built one before? Overall, would you recommend using a turret or avoiding them?
Make sure you use a sturdy bearing system. Make sure you can control it well. Expect it to be challenging, but really neat when it finally works right.
This is where radial loading comes into effect. For certain turret motions, remember what the KoP lazy susans are defined for.
One pro is that under defense, turrets can help score - but only to a degree.
Another pro is that it’s going to make it a lot easier to score with tank drive when shooting. Another pro is cycle time. Depending on where your intake (& theoretical outtake would be), this can save you time.
There are also cons. The one that stands out to me the most is it is sometimes difficult to design, and if it doesn’t work, you typically can’t score well during matches. So remember to “fail fast”. On the bright side, they make great flower pots. I’m joking. Good luck!
If you can control the turret well, it can save time lining up. But if you don’t control it well, and it takes several seconds to “lock on” to the target, then you might be better off not using a turret.
We got a creativity award both times we used a turret. Our Steamworks turret did not work well because it made the shooter too small to get consistent launch speeds. To keep the robot under the height limit we had to keep the shooter small. If it had not been a turret we could have made the shooter larger. The 45" limit is much larger this year. Our other turret was an arm on turret. It did help a lot with overcoming defense last year and helped us win the Iowa regional. We found that if the driver had to aim the turret then they would rather just turn the bot. Our vision system had variable latency that required us to stop and wait a 1/2 second or so before shooting. I think that vision is needed to make a turret shooter make sense and vision is an art unto itself.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.