I have seen from the two regionals (FLR and Buckeye) I’ve been to that a lot of teams change there initial robot design, some teams even went as far as completely rebuilding there robot, with championships on the way i was wondering which teams has change there bot for the better or worst? Also are we going to see some surprises from some teams?
675 will probably be adding a California plate to our Robot at Nationals.
As you guys saw at FLR, we had some tube troubles. So we made an adjustable suction arm so we can optimize the cup placement and also we made a small attachment to help out stability.
We also decided that from now on, we should finish reassembling our lift before quaterfinals, that way when we use it, it works.
At FLR we had to remove either our arm or our ramps/platform. We opted to remove the ramp because many teams could score but a lot had trouble climbing ramps.
Wheels. Swapped ifi traction wheels for tandem on each side moutainboard wheels to drastically increase traction, you’ll see em in atlanta.
-q
696 has not changed their design;)
Some minor changes to our grabber are being tested out. Arm was adjusted to be more robust.
And whatever happened to those wings… hmm…
No change here either. Hey, it works, so why change it? (We did have a minor change at L.A.–have two motors on our arm or two ramps. We chose the ramps after Friday.
We switched our rotory arm for a telescoping arm and put our claw on a hinge for Chesapeake. We might replace our claw for the Championship because we popped two ringers in Annapolis.
1629 made some minor additions to our robot at Pittsburgh and Chesapeake: strategically-placed velcro to keep the platform from folding, a support leg to stabilize the ramp and platforms, and a different set of drive gearboxes to change the ratio and cut back on the speed. Other than that, our troubleshooting was mostly taken care of during build season.
102 re-made our boom. We made it smaller and lighter so we can add our two motors back to get the power we wanted. May not seem like a huge change, but it made all the difference from the NJ Regional to the LI Regional.
Changed the stopping mecanism on our ramps so each lift is worth 12" every time. It required about 20 minutes of work.
Other than that, we added a variety of autonomous modes, and used some surgical tubing to tension our tube scoring elevator upwards for faster and less stressful lifting.
We also turned a custom machined bracket for our grabber into two pieces of angle aluminum with drilled holes (KISS).
Talk about change… my team has had to basically totally change our arm system from our first regional in New Hampshire. We came into New Hampshire suffering from the banebot’s flue, having to change the motor that powers our main arm joint to a window motor and a large gas spring. Then we figured out our turret was not necessary for this game, and that our manipulator was not effective enough. So in New Hampshire we worked tirelessly in the machine shop, while we were playing some mean D, to create a new manipulator.
For our second event in Waterloo we had a totally different manipulator, using the power of the roller claw, one which was (arguably) the quickest at sucking up the tubes and turning them onto the rack (and seemed to pop a few too many… sry :o). After some consistency issues at Waterloo we made more upgrades on thursday at GTR, finishing in 8/63 and got picked second overall. The new manipulator also won us two technical awards at Waterloo and GTR.
I was very proud of how my team was never satisfied with the quality of our robot, and took the mentality to continually improve it. One thing I have learned from building robots is to never give up on a design, and always strive to make your design more effective for the challenge.
Those who watched St. Louis and Midwest could easily tell we changed our arm. We went from a telescoping arm on a turntable that was pretty flimsy to a combination of 217’s, 148’s, and 45’s arms/tube grabber. Our arm probably would have been rather succesful but we never got time to practice with it and resorted to defense. Over my three years this was the biggest change we have made to one of our robots.
We trashed our arm/manipulator setup and are going with a short strong arm and simple gripper for scoring on the bottom row only.
We are taking the weight left over and filling in the gaps of our ramp. The ramps are our best feature anyway,
Um… we braced the manipulator some more… that’s about it. Welded some pieces on Friday night of MWR. Other than that… not a thing. That I know of. Ed probably has something up his sleeve, I haven’t been to many meetings since we got back in town.
903 is currently building a new ramp design 4 natonals because it was dificult for teams 2 climb (idk y though) but u will see a n all nw robot in atlanta
I am pleased to say We changed almost nothing 
Our robot was functional from the start. only not working once… forgot to locktight something in build season and came back to bite us in the $@#$@#$@#.
only changes we made was switching Aluminum 1 inch ramps for stronger/longer lasting carbon fiber ones.
I plan on modifying our gripper a little to make it close / open faster when we get to Atlanta, 3 seconds is just too long
At FLR we found that we needed to take the camera off so we could put some polycarb on our sides if/when we need to remove our bumpers to ramp. Now we have re-worked the pneumatics to remove the entire mounting plate & one tank so we could re-mount our camera. Now when we get to Atlanta we can have some auto modes that do more than burn a hole in the carpet.