This is our second year of doing the FRC and we are doing significantly better than last year. But now our team needs to make bumpers and we would like some help. Our teams goal is to use the low bar and score in the lower portion of the tower. Attached are some pictures of our current design. Our robot is about 26in wide (side that holds the ball) and about 31in long. The square tubing arm extensions lift up and we coral the ball in the u area of our robot. We also have a small piece of plexiglass to keep the ball from rolling out. We also have a pneumatic cylinder that punches the ball out of the little coral. We were just looking for help on how to legally create bumpers for it. The plan is to currently cover the outside edges and put the bumpers 8in from the corners on the front and leave a gap for the ball to enter through. If there are any ways that we could make legal bumpers and we aren’t not seeing it could be helpful.
that’s tricky. the frame that moves up and down on a cylinder to capture the boulder is specifically not legal as a frame perimeter, since it is articulated.
you can add a perimeter around this that is used to support the bumpers, but the gap in the front will end up being just barely wide enough to get the ball in.
can you sketch in paint or something on your picture to show how you want to put on bumpers?
I’ve sketched out basic bumper locations. keep in mind you need to get a sturdy piece of frame out to these areas to support the bumpers.
You could extend your chassis front/back to hold bumpers there (by my calculations up to 3" total), and out the sides for the same purpose.
You may have to remove the treads or reduce the size of the front wheel to make that work.
Your intake/corral needs to be able to reach over the bumpers to stay the same width. As the above poster stated, it can’t be counted as part of the FP, so maybe leaving it up at the start of the match and lowering it once the bell rings could let it coult as something extending beyond the FP.
The main issue you have is the 8" bumper per side-next-to-corner rule. You could have the corral reach over the bumpers and corral external to the robot (as 8" of bumper per side leaves only 10" for the ball to pass through).
If your robot is currently 26" wide, when you add bumpers, it will be at least 30" wide. The width of the low goal is about 24". How close do you have to get in order to score?
With the arm lifters we didn’t count it as our frame perimeter. We were planning on having the bumpers corner around the front wheels and leave a gap for the Boulder. Thinking about it now we need to alter or extend our arm system since it wouldn’t work with our bumper idea. We didn’t include the arm lifters in our interpretation of the frame perimeter. The fp just went around the treads and front wheels. I can try to get something from paint though.
Our build team has some ideas on how to make supports for the bumpers but I don’t know them off hand since I’m a programmer.
