We had a pretty unique robot at worlds this year with a completely passive four bar on the back, so we wanted to (somewhat jokingly) show it off:
This four bar allowed us to posses 3 goals while retaining all the functions of a meta bot. We decided to implement a passive four bar rather than use a transmission because there was basically no situation where it’d be beneficial to lower the back four bar, and it didn’t have the complexity, weight, and friction of a transmission. Even if we missed the goal rush with this back four bar, and it lifted without a goal, we’d just become a regular meta bot because the assembly is out of the way and fairly light.
The only significant trade off we had to make was lowering our drive speed to 257 rpm to have enough torque to climb with 3 goals. In hindsight, this was a bit overkill and we probably could’ve got away with 280 or even 300 rpm.
Feel free to ask any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them below!