Did anyone use a corkscrew or screw thread device to acquire and release hatches?
987 used it to adjust the position so the driver had a bunch of play, they were able to make it work so well!
You can see it work at 1:18
Cool. I’ll look for pictures of that from the front. That video hides the fun part!
3419 used a lead screw to line up our intake with the hatches and balls. You can see it in a few places in this video, including right in the first few seconds
Thanks for all of these, but most of them are rotating nubs, fingers, or latches to hold a hatch, and then the robot backs up to pull it from the loading station.
I was looking for a design that the lead of the screw pulled the hatch off/out of the loading station.
We didnt use a leadscrew but we used a pneumatic cylinder to pull the hatch out and place it on. We have used linear actuators (2016) and made our own lead screw setup (2017) before so if you want some information on how to do it, I can charge some knowledge.
Not sure if it is what you mean, but rookie team 7763 from NC had a lead screw and hook hatch mechanism that was very effective at doing the cargoship.
Sounds like OP is thinking more like a screw the diameter of the hole in the center of a Hatch and you “drill” into the Hatch to acquire it.
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Yes exactly! Did anyone do that? Like a big Nerf screw or something or rubber? Something you could jam in even on an angle?
You can’t thread into a round hole. Without a slot for the flute of a thread to pass through, your hypothetical screw-shaped mech would just be pushing flexible flaps through the panel whether it rotated or not. And in that case, you don’t need the screw, you just need some flexible flaps (which is what lots of teams ended up with, including 5406).
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You can cross-thread it! If it were flexible, maybe your are right, the shape of the device doesn’t matter, but a fluted object might grab and be simple to drive. The release probably wouldn’t be very good though. Thank you for commenting.
I had thought up an idea similar to what you are describing except it wasn’t a helical sweep like a screw. Terrible drawing below. The proportions are way off the one I 3D printed was <6" diameter. You drove up to the hatch rotated the mechanism locking the hatch in place then placed the hatch by rotating it to the unlocked side.
Camren, if I’m understanding your picture correctly, that’s basically what we did. Take a look at 3419’s video above. The mechanism worked as follows:
-It was actuated by a rotary piston that turned through 270 degrees. (For reference, the shaft of the piston pointed towards the hole in the disc)
-A small pinion gear was mounted to the shaft of the pinion.
-Surrounding that pinion gear were three gears, each twice as big as the pinion, so they rotated through 135 degrees. This resembled a planetary gearing stage.
-On the same shafts as the the “planet” gears were the cam-shaped things you can see in the video.
-When collapsed, the three cams made a circle about 3” in diameter.
-When opened, they grew to about 7” in diameter.
-Since it was driven by a piston that physically could never fully open (because the 7” was greater than the 6” opening of the disc) it was continuously applying pressure on the inside of the hole in the disc.
-The cam shapes were also slightly tapered outwards, so it was basically impossible to pull the disc off.
This certainly wasn’t our most competitive year for a bunch of reasons, but this mechanism worked beautifully. We never once missed an intake or inadvertently dropped a disc.
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