or, “When Your Ambitious Plans Don’t Quite Work Out.”
It seemed to me that, as I posted photographs of my team’s robot, most people didn’t completely grasp its design intent. I was purposefully a bit vague; both because it was fun and because we knew that the design was ambitious and just might not work.
I thought it’d be fun to share this photo that I came across in our gallery that shows the robot as it was intended to operate.
I hope that the team can make it work for the Championship, because it sure would be nice to see it deployed out on the field like that just once…
So – does anyone else care to share their stories about what their robot was supposed to do this year or years passed? I think it’s sometimes fun to see how we find alternate functions for mechanisms or pare down our design strategies when our ambition exceeds our current abilities
The arm telescopes to ~12’ long, allowing it to reach just beyond the stationary goals. It can also rotate 360*, allowing it to reach anywhere in the middle of the field, essentially.
The ball claw (I don’t know if that was the final design, for what it’s worth) is raised and lowered on a winch, allowing it grab balls from as high as the stationary goals and as low as the floor.
Tyler – it took twelve people to get it down, but I’m not sure how long it took them
Team 1064 had a very ambitious initial design. We were going to have the base that we have now with a pair of uprights on the large wheel side. These uprights would support an arm mechanism that could rotate from front to back of the robot and slide up and down the uprights. This arm would be able to grab large balls and cap goals. The arms would also have hooks on the end of them for the hang - part of the reason they move up and down. The other reason to move up and down was so that we could cap our robot - we had planned on having a basket on the rest of the robot that would actually hold two large balls (I told you it was ambitious!). The design worked out out so that the basket would fold out and be just large enough for the balls, yes still leave room for the arms to grab a third large ball and hold it anywhere on the robot. The basket was also going to have a roller at the bottom so that small balls that were captured during the ball dump could be fed to the human.
yep, the yellow tube part dangling down is originally supposed to be able to manipulate the 2x multiplier balls, but i don’t think it worked out very well for them.
Well…we were planning on having a robot that could herd balls (via extending plow arms from the front of our robot), grab the multiplier (gigantic claw on a forklift-esque mechanism), and hang (the top part of the claw had a hook on its end).
We didn’t get the multiplier OR hang once during Detroit, and we weren’t all that great at gathering balls. In short, nothing worked right. Our robot is a failure…
