Roboteers Team 2481 2020 Robot Reveal
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Is that just a straight up bike wheel?
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I feel like I was transported back to 2006 (in a good way). Y’all are absolute madlads, especially in recent years.
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This is … new
Well then…
Jokes aside, this looks amazing.
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Most unique robot of 2020, well done!
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This is insane. How did you guys decide to use a bike wheel? Was it just one of those ideas that people throw around as a joke and then you go “wait, actually” or was this something you had somewhat in mind?
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That’s exactly the shooter mechanism I wanted to build after I heard about all of the ball consistency issues. You guys built it beautifully!
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Every year I see your robot reveals and say to myself, “wow that’s a very effective robot with a slightly atypical design.”
This year however… wow, that is more than a slightly atypical design and I love it! Amazing robot as always, keep up the awesome work!
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Scoring a degloved ball from behind the DJ booth is such a flex, I love it.
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Looks awesome! Hope we’ll get to see it this year, because this is one of the coolest and most creative designs I’ve ever seen in FRC.
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Looks like that ball made it into the inner port as well… wow
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Swerve really enables a lot of different design choices when it comes to intake and indexer packaging, which then allowed for the largest diameter flywheel I’ve seen in a long time. Really cool solution. Can you step us through some of the design and prototyping process? Did you arrive at the giant flywheel design early-on as a constraint of getting enough linear velocity at a reasonable RPM? Or was it driven by testing and iteration with damaged balls?
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This is definitely a counterpoint to, “don’t let your dreams be memes”.
Full courting with the accuracy shown here is an Einstein caliber meme.
Great robot!
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For some reason all I can think of is Rumpelstiltskin
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The original bike type prototype had 2 rails wrapped all the way around and a 27" tire, which handled rough balls really well, but a new ball shot way high. We then used a cardboard tube to knock down the newer balls, which worked really well.
Next, we switched to a 24" tire and used 2 rails as the first part of the hood, and a the same cardboard tube as the second part of the hood. As you mentioned, this gave the balls a more linear shot, which eleminated the balls “bouncing around” by going around a tight corner at high speed. The larger radius of the bike tire also helped eliminate this, while still getting enough time to get traction on the balls and shoot them all at the same speed. This prototype shot 15 in a row into the inner goal using brand new and really old balls (no rips).
From there, we switched to PVC because it’s stronger, and covered it in duct tape to match the friction of the cardboard. The rest of the build season we spend getting the bike tire on the robot and replicating the prototype in a nice and reliable fashion.
As for where this whole idea came from, we were looking hard for a solution to the problems of the balls getting badly worn down, and it was an idea my dad and I tried out in our shed. We wanted a bigger radius wheel, but also light, and the bike tire was the best solution, so we tried it and it worked (eventually). Hope that answers some questions!
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Just cannot image the linear speed power cells get from that massive flywheel. This shooter is a beast
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No way.
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Favorite robot of the year
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Favorite robot of the decade.
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This is the first robot to make me say “holy c*p.” 
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