In anticipation of the U.S. Open, we have decided to showcase a portion of our robot. A full reveal will hopefully be done by next week.
We decided to keep our robot mostly intact from State. We ended up changing the intake mechanism back to a hook conveyor instead of a side roller and hopper, and the results were as we hoped. Making this switch reduced the amount of weight needed to be lifted significantly, allowing us to have a larger cube capacity.
Here is a clip of our robot from shortly after completion of the changes (with great narration :)): 1200 scoring 4 cubes - YouTube
We have practiced driving and have upgraded some of the robot since that video and can now score more quickly. We are still working on finalizing the autonomous, but should be done for the full reveal.
With more practice it will be interesting to see how this robot will end up in terms of efficiency compared to 1, 2 or 3 capacity cube scoring robots. Do you have a Skyrise manipulator, or is this a specialist cube scorer?
I’ll be interested to see how this deploys from the 18" cube, looking forward to a full reveal.
I don’t think we will be scoring 4 cubes every time, as it is difficult to do in a match setting given the unpredictability of the other robots. I think that 3 cubes at once is an optimal balance between speed and effectiveness, but in certain situations it can be beneficial to score 4.
We don’t have a Skyrise manipulator of any sort as we decided to focus only on cubes.
It deploys from 18 inches in quite a unique way from what we have ever built. It makes autonomous more of a challenge but pays off in a match.
Nice robot. It looks like it folds on hinged at the beginning of the match to fit within the barrier. That narration was awesome. It would be interesting to see this on a double reverse four bar lift…
It does indeed fold out at the start of the match. I too wonder what it would be like to have this intake on a reverse double four bar, but a previous iteration of our robot had that style and didn’t work very well which is partially why we stayed with an 8 bar.