Our most recent video from an exclusive video! This is currently the VEX IQ Mix & Match World Record… at least in a compeitition 
. Please discuss what you guys think of the seperate claws: are they better and faster, or just a cosmetic only design?
I’ve had a love affair with clawbots since the first year of VEX. If they can figure out how to raise the claws up so they can stack 3 that will be pretty amazing.
Our team built a pneumatic claw that could rotate 180 degrees. Attached it to a dr4b that could go real high. Problems:
- a nice claw for pins has a lot of trouble with the beam
- pin stacking needs to happen quickly and pin manipulation with a claw, even with the best drivers, is just really slow. And our dr4b powered by two motors using planetary gears was fast and powerful, even with heavy loads. But the claw was the speed-killer. Kids finally decided a cool claw was indeed cool, but slow. They are handling the pins differently now.
- The beam is heavy and slippery. And if it slows things down too much then simplify the bot to handle pins. That was our team’s decision. I feel that by later in the season it will be important to be able to handle the beam to differentiate oneself from all the conveyor/revolving storage bots that are all the rage currently. Our team is somewhat lazy and decided that bot looked like too much work
. So they’re going with something else for now. The most experienced/interested teams in our league (we are not one of those - “lazy” applies here) are going conveyor with revolving storage. Will be interesting to see how things evolve over the season.
I have a similar robot, only the claws arent individually controllable and it is cabable of easily creating 3 pin stacks with the claws
Update on attempts to use their dr4b. They only need to lift a three-stack to fit on the elevated center stack. The dr4b they built reaches 28 inches. We discussed the concept of “overkill” and what it means. Them being fifth graders, initial thoughts about what that word meant were… interesting 
. But after joking for a few seconds, they understood they could go way simpler, and are building a simple 4-bar lift to hook to their pin intake. Their initial design uses the Chewbotca double plush wheels for each side. My son just built a similar intake using a special Hexbug set wheel combined with the short rubber intake belt that is simpler and lighter, so we may have a winner there - need to fully build and test with at least one other teammate before documenting in the notebook. Photo is using the dr4b hooked to the intake to get an idea of how to build a simpler arm to match the spacing, etc. My son has ideas on how to make his rubber belt intake operate with one motor, which will help with lifted weight and also give them another motor to use for something else.
Our league is also starting up, so lots of new teams building Huey and getting excited for the upcoming season. Our most experienced team has fine-tuned their converyor bot with rotating storage for 4 stacks and just needs to tune their pneumatic mechanism to release their stored pins. Good times for everyone right now.
The team’s intake is rock-solid making 3-pin stacks and can reach to place a stack on the center goal. One problem though…their arm doesn’t reach high enough to lift itself off the 3-pin stack. So they placed the stack and then were “stuck” on the center goal, unable to escape. So now they want a more compact dr4b to reach higher, but took apart their old one for parts and are having a hard time remembering how exactly to build the dr4b again . They got pretty frustrated but then realized they could just put a 2-pin stack on the center goal and call it good. They can 3-pin all they want on the lower goals. I’m hoping they try and build another dr4b though. Our team also decided on a digital notebook this year with a shared google slide file, so any member can work on it and the others can see in real time what they are writing. Also can import digital images, etc, very easily. They actually like the notebook this year, and they can also actually read what they wrote (handwriting was an issue last year lol). This is a huge improvement from last year, where getting them to do anything in the notebook was dificult.
Nice dr4b! Looks pretty big though, you could make it a bit smaller I think.
It will be up to them. I scoured thrift stores and facebook marketplace over the summer and found 20+ Hexbug robotics sets. So our team has a ton of parts to play around with. They built a standard 4-bar lift that reaches high enough. They also learned from getting “hung up” to measure exactly how high they needed to lift their intake to escape after placing a 3-pin stack on the center goal. The issue now is the 5:1 gear ratio provided by the 12-tooth driving gear into the 60-tooth driven is not as reliable as they’d like. So they need just a touch more torque. Later that day I came across something my son had built - a compound gear mechanism that probably will end up being 1:2000-3000 just eyeballing it - picture below. Ever since a baby he’s been fascinated with spinning stuff, and gears especially. So he understands compound gears and now just needs to build something appropriate for his team’s bot. They may just go simpler, or build a smaller dr4b, as you note. They currently seem inspired, and it’s really useful to have so many parts at home (they are using the “spider legs” from a Hexbug Spider kit at two of the 4 arms in the lift. The other two arms are from the “Robotic Arm” Hexbug kit. None of these pieces are in the competition kit, and they pride themselves on having non-standard colors and parts. They do need to have the “legal parts” document loaded up a phone or ipad during competitions though - the judges often have not seen these parts either, and can be skeptical…
Cool! You could try teaching them about cascade lifts next, it’s like the next stage haha.
Most of my time is getting them to stop goofing around. We have 4 team members and they tend to work best in groups of 2, or for my son, by himself (especially with me absent except if he can’t find a part he wants, or wants to do something and is there a part(s) that can do what he wants). The digital notebook has been really helpful so that when the team members do more independent work they can document it and the other members can look it over later and not be totally surprised by whatever changes occurred on their bot. They learned the hard way last season that they need to practice driving their bot more. They have been doing a lot more of that this season. They still are weak on coding to make their driving easier. They also want to do automation this year, and seem to understand what this will require. Regardless, the more interested they are, and the more they do, the better. I am happy to just be the taxi/uber/lyft person, and parts supplier, etc.
Regarding cascade lifts, the team is very interested in speed. They learned from last year that any slow aspect to their bot can be detrimental. So they are currently interested in speed. This is why they chose to disregard the beam. They feel it’s not worth enough points to justify the time and effort to manipulate it. One member really wants to handle the beam though. I am counting on him to come up with an idea that might work. He doesn’t go online so hasn’t seen the various ideas out there. I don’t plan on showing him them either.
As a coach of an IQ team myself, I can comfirm that this is the main function of a coach… and the most tedious one.
How were you able to encourage them to have a notebook? Were they the ones who wanted it?
They wanted to do a notebook, and our robotics league posted the slide templates and we went with that. We have 4 members, and although I’m the coach, any of the three other moms (I’m a dad) could easily be coach. They are all very involved and have strong science backgrounds (and current careers) so all of our team members don’t really have a choice about doing the notebook 
. It has worked really well thus far.
I was off by more than an order of magnitude. There are five 5:1 and three 3:1 in this compound gear train. Made my son do the math, since he built the thing. (Five to the fifth power)(three to the third power)= 84,375:1 final reduction. His conclusion was the bot could do amazing lifting if using this. But the 60 second match would be too short and the plastic pieces would break if lifting something so heavy as to require this type of torque boost. A good lesson in torque vs speed in-real-life was learned, even if jokingly.
Two ways:
- If in a class, grade every Friday. 100 Points.
- If in a club, kids show up but robot is locked up. Coach has written on the board, finish notebook, then you get your bot back.
As educators we do all kinds of devious things to make sure the kids do the learning stuff.
I may have to use the second one for my own V5 team, I am just a member/builder but am in charge of the currently non-existent notebook bar my entries and people aren’t doing it! Thanks for the great idea!