Just in case anyone might be interested. Sadly, my camera’s battery died, so I don’t have any footage of the epic 148 v 118 show down in the semis, but this match still seems noteworthy.
so what is team 148 using? I know its their “secret weapon” but from the video I see the arm part moving up but the red alliance robo blocks the view for a second. Is the “arm” pushing off the playing field or something?
I never got a close up look at it. All I saw of it was a black rod extending down and pushing up that side of the bridge. I believe there was a caster on the bottom, and it looked smooth but fast, so I’d guess it was a pneumatic cylinder with some needle valves to control the speed.
Yes it is a pneumatic cylinder with a telescoping square tube and castor that allows their back wheels to hang off the edge of the bridge and to prevent it from tipping back their direction. (As far as I know they didn’t use it in this match). Also of note, 922 is mecanum in the long direction, so 148 is pushing them up the bridge sideways.
That match was amazing, I was at the scoring table and was just in shock, you can see me walk away from the table (I was only an inspector) and throw my hat after they get balanced. I haven’t seen that many camera phones come out that quickly before in a long time.
I was the Driver For FIRST Team 2936 that was awesome!!!
Miguel!
You can watch it retract at the end. 245 is in the way for the deployment.
If you look VERY close you can watch it work. The bridge lifts, THEN the robots push forward a little, and then it retracts back up. Suggesting they used their deployment device to level themselves with the bridge, bumped the robots forward just far enough, and then retracted their cylinder.
Smart money would be on them having a sensor on the end to tell how well balanced the bridge is.
Using sensors, my guess is it’s hard to tell “how well” the bridge is balanced. Unless you can figure out the force being exerted on the cylinder, I suppose. A gyro would return you that you’re level the moment you went up, regardless if the bridge would balanced if they brought the cylinder up. However, if you can judge the moment when the bridge truly levels out and the cylinder does less work than before, you could automatically decide when to bring up the cylinder.
There’s a Sensor for that. It’s called a Load Cell. They can be pretty useful in the right application. Like digital scales and such.