Team 696 Design, "Reinvent the Wheel"

FIRST Robot Showcase
1

Hey guys,

Our team just decided which mechanism we’re going to use to score today, and here are some photos of one of our prototypes.

The system is actually very ingenious. There is a spinning wheel at the front of the robot, just high enough above the ground so that it drives over innertubes but not completely over. Imagine it as your shoe when you step on the innertube. It kicks up, right? Well that’s what we’re going for here. The wheel kicks the innertube up and over the waiting arms of our hook, then the inner tube hits a flip switch once it’s reached the optimum angle. The wheel reverses and our arm lifts it up! Whamo! You picked up an innertube in 2 seconds.

Plus, the wheel auto-centers the innertube. Very useful for the driver!

Here are some pictures of the wheel design (remember, they’re prototypes, so forgive the rough edges!):

We mounted the arm, and it interfaced with the wheel perfectly. You can see here that the innertube gets kicked up at the perfect angle for our hooks to pick it up. The arm is controlled by humans in this shot, but the wheel is completely motorized!

It’s worth mentioning our innovative end effector design. We wanted to use something fast, something efficient, and easy to repair on the fly. Our design uses two rods of aluminum long enough so that they can reach deep into a spider and despoil a far spoiler, without hitting the big fat “O” on the spider leg! Check it out.

The hooks are not static objects; they are swinging, and they’re limited in their rotation so that they don’t flip and get caught on the spiders (in case you were wondering). We tried our arm many times, and it’s very fast. We call it the “slam dunker” because it lets you go up to any spider leg and simply SLAM DUNK that innertube right on there! The flexible aluminum rods split farther apart, conforming to the shape of the “O,” getting around its interference to our scoring.

SLAM DUNK!

So in the end, this prototype has many advantages:

  1. It’s light. The arm is single jointed, and its hooks are available at any OSH store.
  2. The wheel is useful. It sets the arm up for a perfect grab every time, and it’s bloody fast.
  3. A bunch of others!

We hope you like our prototype design.

Good luck teams! We hope you like our idea!

2

This is a really clever idea. Thanks for sharing it, I am sure it will inspire many other ideas. If nothing else it shows teams that have been thinking “inside the box” that there are many different solutions out there to this problem.

Good luck with it.

Jason

3

Very interesting, I like the use of the wheel as a centering device.

How does it work if you come at the tube not centered on it? Say the tube is a little to the left and you drive up, does the wheel center it on?

All aside it looks good.

4

Dear Brad,

Believe me, we tried it. We wanted to be like JPL/NASA, where they created every worst case scenario possible for the Mars missions. The wheel actually self-centers the innertube! We were quite relieved.

Also, if we reverse the wheel while we’re driving, we can prevent opponent innertubes from getting in our way. The wheel simply flings them aside.

5

I love our “motor” manning the arm. Always a classic. I think we can fit one of our smaller members on the bot with no problem.

On a related note, we are taking donations for a new ceiling…

6

Can your wheel pick up tubes off the ground…or only the ones leaning against the wall?

7

One of our design proposals including wheels for “flipping” the tubes up onto an arm. We opted not to go with it for a few reasons, namely that it’s an additional degree of freedom, additional failure point, and (most importantly) is dictates the position of your tube to being perpendicular (or close to it) from the ground.

8

We found otherwise.

9

Yeah lil lav just bash his design, props.

10

I like it. Don’t listen to lil lav and his debunking. Keep it up, yo!

11

Sean was just stating what his team’s thoughts were in the design phase, he did not mean to take away from the design being presented here.

Thanks for showing in complete detail your wheel, looking forward to seeing a video of it in action.

12

yeah we thought of that as well, mostly because we were lazy and didnt wanna bend over to pick up the tubes, and we applied it to the robot.

theres really no reason it wouldnt work, we just found that it would get in the way of the arm we already had designed and its extra weight which we are trying to save for a special something.:wink:

13

I was in no way bashing their design. If I felt it wasn’t a viable solution or thought they might experience unsurmountable difficulty in getting it to work properly I would have said so. The fact is that if other teams have considered and/or adopted it (such as 116 and 1279 have stated that they have), it proves that this should be a potentially successful design.
I was merely voicing why 116 opted not to go with that design. As 696 has already expressed many of the advantages and innovations with the design, I felt I had no need to express them again.
Go troll elsewhere.
Kthxbye

14

Nice prototype.