I’ve seen many well built robots that can pick up boxes and stack at the same time. In 99.9% of the pictures, the boxes are all upright. Can anyone make a stack while picking up boxes that are not up right?
in theory, assuming that we finish with some of the little systems.
Although our stacker went into the box both unassembled and untested, it has hands which can rotate approximately 270 degrees which are designed to orient a box which is not upright.
I suspect that we will not have the thing working totally correctly til our second regional.
Yes, we designed the robot so that it can grab the boxes in any orientation. During practices, we stacked bins upside down, sometimes with a sideways bin on top. Once we organize our photos and video footage, we’ll probably post some pictures.
Greg
well, our team can pick up boxes in any orientation, but stacking them we found out that we can stack most of them
here’s a link to a pic of us stacking this way
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pictures.php?s=&action=single&picid=4020
and here
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pictures.php?s=&action=single&picid=3936
We can pick up a box in any orientation and stack it in any orientation and we are very fast at it we have 3 axis motion on our arm ( with a lazy suzie on bottom ) in which we have an amazing amount of precision while stacking
That stack is to show you that we can stack any which way and balance it, we can also stack in the ordered fassion which seems to be popular ( bottom of box fitting into top of box )
this way we feel we will get a better multiplier because it is taller in shu’s thus 2 boxes on top of each other gets us x3
:: edit bah I didn’t know abe already posted 
::
I’d consider a box upside down, to be virtually the same as a box upright. Varied orientation includes on the side, but more importantly at an angle to the bot, many pics show internal stackers that hold boxes long ways, can those bots come at a 45 degree angle to a box and grab it. What about crowded situations where boxes are close to each other on the floor. Can you grab a box thats at an angle, on its side, thats tightly packed with other bots? If so can you do it fast. Those are the real questions.
well from what i’ve seen at the scrimmages it is nearly impossible to get a stack over two high with the other robots ramming you while you are trying to make a stack.
We can pick-up in every orientation except upside down lengthwise. The most preferable stack is either upright or upside down the long way and we can manipulate most boxes into these configurations fairly quickly. We can lift a max of 6 boxes upright to make a stack of seven, and a max of 4 upside down for a stack of 5. One timed practice round we make 4 stacks of three and had time to get back on the ramp. We know it will be completely different with multiple bots but thats the best we can do.
we finally rigged u p our bot to upright any bin in any orientation.
some bins take longer to orient than others, so i think that upright bins and upside down bins will be focused on for our team
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lol like our entire robot. wel lactually well, actually jst a last minute ajustment to out drive traun( we werusing just the chips and realized we had our bot geared too high soo we added in the drills)[/quote]
The scrimmages have shown that stacking as a whole takes too much time to be truly effective. We can orient boxes just by setting our forklifts to the appropriate height, but it is much easier to simply steal the enemy’s human player stacks, which by the rules have to be in the upright position. We just steal one of the enemy stacks at the beginning of the match and carry it around with us until the end, when we deposit it where we want to. The other added benefit is that carrying boxes = more mass = more traction for shoving matches.
this is how we did it
In case you missed it in one of the first team updates, it was stated that stack heights will be rounded down to the next stack height unit, making up-side down etc. stacks pretty much useless.
Our stacker can only stack right side up boxes, but we have an easy method of orienting them.