Resourceful Thinking

FIRST General Forum
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“I don’t care what it was designed to do, I care about what it CAN do!”

I think what of the most exciting things at the competitions is watching robots and teams implement innovative strategies or using their robots in ways that they weren’t designed to.

I remember back in 2002’s Zone Zeal, all those “proboscis” devices were really nice. I recall trying to develop a similar device that wouldn’t break the rules… and for some reason I never thought of something running along the ground. And I really wish I remembered the team name/number, but they had a smaller second robot that would detach and drive around the field while tethered to the main robot. What a cute little bugger. It was at the GLR I think… maybe… if not, the CDN regional.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t very involved in last years stack attack, but I remember at the CDN regional, one team used hockey sticks to knock down the bins. LAFF. Don Cherry would be proud.

What about this year? Any stories? Did you end up using a part of your robot for a completely different function?

I know with our team, we had designed these two arms to swing out and around our robot to herd balls and knock off the 10 point ball… but naturally, once we actually started competing, we realized that the game focused on the hanging from the bar. So we rarely herded at all. As we competed in Pittsburgh, we realized that our robot was very susceptable to driving over the balls. So we ended up ditching our autonomous program (which is a real shame… I wish I saw it work. We only ran it once, and that was by accident during the Pittsburgh practice round… but it seemed to work!) because those balls were a pain to manoeuver around. But of course, every now and again there’d be a ball in the way of us… so we used those arms to just whack them out of the way! And later on in the Canadian regional, we started using the arms for yet another purpose… while hanging on the bar, we can swing them out and interfere with lift systems across the entire platform. It’s too bad we didn’t have the foresight to develop something more powerful and sturdy, but when we needed them to, they did their job. Laff, they even managed to slow down 48’s lift system for those precious few seconds to win the round for us.

http://vgamp.com/storage/cdn_arm_hang.mpeg

Too bad the video I have isn’t the whole bit, just couple seconds before this 48’s hook was caught up in our arm. I still have to congratulate 48 though; you guys had a great reliable robot, to the point where even when there seemed to be no time left you could still manage to get up on that platform and hang.

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For the record, I know we weren’t at GLR or CDN, but the Leopards had a mini-bot for 2002. I’m doubting we were the only team, though. At any rate, I don’t know that I remember TOO many creative uses of robots at LSR. Lots of teams using big ball arms and stuff to get in the way of robots trying to hang. One robot that decapped a goal. I’m biased, but my favorite match was the last one on Friday. Team 57 was up against a good hanging robot. They had 2 more balls than us and were hanging on the bar already, so we lifted up above them, then lowered ourselves on top of them so they touched, just barely. We had to try a ton of times, and only got them to touch at the last second. I think that was pretty darn good.

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Last year we designed our frame so that we would have plenty of ground clearance for the ramp before we built the ramp. The frame had a 45 degree bevel on the front. After we got the ramp built we realized we had built way to much ground clearance especially with the bevel. If we weren’t careful we could climb over boxes. This same bevel ended up saving us from tipping many times. Instead of tipping the bevel would hit flat on the ground and we would upright again because all the weight in the back. I remember one match where we tipped forward onto the bevel going down the ramp and then slid down the whole length of the ramp only on the bevel.

This year are “creative” part was a trash can lid/ shop vac hybrid. Now this thing sucked. They even gave us a creativity award for it and our funny accronym name OSCAR (Our Super Cool Awesome Robot).

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[quote=FizMan]
I remember back in 2002’s Zone Zeal, all those “proboscis” devices were really nice. I recall trying to develop a similar device that wouldn’t break the rules… and for some reason I never thought of something running along the ground. And I really wish I remembered the team name/number, but they had a smaller second robot that would detach and drive around the field while tethered to the main robot. What a cute little bugger. It was at the GLR I think… maybe… if not, the CDN regional.

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Last year we built an arm for stacking (which turned out to be an ineffective strategy). But at Nationals, we actually used it to climb on top of another bot. We reached over them, pushed down with the arm so that our front wheels were off the ground, and just drove right on top of them.

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I’ve gotta say, the Firebirds (aka 433) probably used their arm for about a billion different things at Palmetto. High-centering? A smidge. But it was mind-blowingly effective.

Our robot, when we built it, was supposed to handle the 2X ball on the mobile goals and do some light herding. Boy, did that not work right. Sure, we uncapped–but then we’d lose our grip on the sucker, and we’d be stuck. So we ditched the arm altogether and ran with the base. It actually was pretty good at defense, helping us defeat 1319 (at that point the #1 seed, and still finished #8), and leading to our brief proclamation that 1293 was “armless, not harmless.” (That was squashed pretty well with a defeat in our final qualifier.)

We came, we saw, we learned. I shudder to think what we’ll have in 2005. (A sponsor, perhaps.)

By the way, since the FIRST website doesn’t have anything before Stack Attack, can someone point me to some archived rules? I’d love to find out what Maize Craze was back in 1992.

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That sounds almost exactly like what we did at the New England Regional. Fortunately we still had our small ball system.
Our website has a fairly good description of each year’s game. I hope it can satisfy your curiosity. Just click on “history.”

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one thing that surprised my team at the BAE regional is what our CG allows us to do. by tradition, we always use 7-8" wheels which do not allow us to climb the 6" step. However, this year we found out that with our extremely low CG (roughly 6" off the ground) we are at least able to casually drive off of the 6" step :confused:. this is very confusing to the casual observer due to the fact that we have a robot that fills a good portion of the dimensions that we are allowed. However, about 90% of our total weight resides in the base part of the bot.

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In a qualifying match (our second i think), our bot fought to get hooked on the bar. Once on, we started the winch. One of the other alliance bot’s (330) was already hanging and unfortunitly directly above us. Our winch operator didn’t stop the winch once we were off the ground, so the winch kept lifting.
About 5 seconds later and after hoasting 250 lbs., we inadvertantly removed the other team from the bar.

Our bot also features a four-bar lift to use in un-capping and re-capping the goals.

In one of quarter final matches, we were hanging, the other alliance was attempting to “hook” on the bar.
They positioned themselves and were about to drop the hook, when we raised the four-bar effectively blocking their arm from attaching to the bar.

We won that match 75 to 25.

Phil

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With last year’s robot, we initially designed a long arm that would allow us to stack bins and push them and knock over stacks all with the same mechanism. But we soon found out that it was way to huge and gave us a sickening tendency to tip over. So… We took out all of the arm except the bottom most part, allowing us to have a moving arm perfectly capable for knocking over stacks. It worked great along with some capable drivers! Another benefit it had: if a few rounds we tipped over as a result of some hard pushing… But our handy arm could reright us onto our wheels every time.

This year we use a telescoping arm that extends 11 feet upwards, that allows us to hang from the floor. Fortunately, it does exactly what we designed it to, and doesn’t make us tip. But, as an added benefit, once again, if we ever tip over, it can reright us. My being the arm operator these past two years and also being one of the arm designers has been a trip- lots of surprises!

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