My team has yet to decide what material we are going to use for our climbing hook and I was wondering what other teams have decided to use.
I’ve seen metal and plastic (presumably polycarbonate) hooks. Teams with translating climbers have a wheeled trolley. The most stupidly simple idea I’ve seen is Robonauts’ Everybot, which uses a chopped up carabiner.
Not fully sure what we are doing but odds are it will be layers of laser cut plywood lamented together the same we used in 2018 and might modify for a posible auto level
Vinyl coated steel. It appears that the weight ratings are based on the tear out of the fasteners. I stuck a big screwdriver through one of the holes, put the hook on some metal framing and picked myself off the floor (195 lb). Other students were able to do the same. The observers didn’t notice any significant flexing of the hook.
I bought some 1/4 x 1" aluminum strap today, to make hooks from. We made a sample from some used metal a couple weeks ago, it looks like it could work. Pretty easy to bend around a 1.5ish inch OD round thing, to get it to about the right shape, as long as you have a vise to clamp it in.
1/4" polycarbonate with stand-offs. So far so good, but we’ll swap over to aluminum if it shows us any sign of not being strong enough. I don’t anticipate that happening.
We are using 2 peices of aluminum with a chunk of neoprene sandwitched inbtween the two peices becuase my janky idea of just wrapping surgical tubing was a bad idea apparently.
Polycarb. As a general rule on our team, any part of the robot that has to be run into a field element is polycarb. We’ve got some grip tape wrapped around the contact point to keep from sliding around on the bar.
Milled aluminum trolley wheels. The drilled out holes are for, depending on your perspective, extra grip on the pipe, desparate attempts to get down to 125 pounds, or just because they look cool.