The tournament we were scheduled to be in this Saturday has been postponed until January 17th. We are kind of glad. It gives the teams a little more time to tweak their new Design called Rob O. Tic.
I believe it might be the first VRC robot with no wheels. If anyone is aware of another VRC robot without wheels. please post and let us know about it.
If there is or has been one out there, for what game was it designed? How did it do? I would love to pass on info to the students about anyone else that has attempted a robot with no wheels of any kind.
I believe few seasons ago, there was talk in the forum about the Hand of God (HOG).
In fact, I think it is for gateway. And I think the team was Aperture Robotics. But sad to say, think they stopped due to funding issue.
The idea then was to have a robot that will stay put in the starting tile, but with a long enough arm that can reach every corner of the field.
I actually thought of reviving this HOG design for this season. But my teams were all not too keen.
That sounds cool, but our team has nothing so ambitious as that. I am not sure there would be any advantage in this game for that type robot unless it was able to reach everywhere without touching any of the grey tiles. Maybe it can be done, but I do not see how within the VEX design system.
Thanks for the info, though. I have tried to find some evidence of what my teams are doing having been done, or even tried, before and so far, I have not found it.
Saturday January 17th will be the first version of it. We shall see if they have any success at all.
Well, there are certain advantages. One of the obvious advantages will be - without the need to move around, you can have up to 8 motors for the lift. That’s a big advantage in terms of the number of cubes you can carry and also the speed of the lift.
And imagine the robot’s pneumatic system doing the building of skyrise (control by one driver) while the long arm (control by another driver) continue with the cubes simultaneously.
And looking at this season game, there is no real need to cover the entire field. So it is a possible winning design (but a boring one).
As for how possible it is to be implemented using Vex - well… Aperture Robotics did a god job and was progressing pretty well (I think so) before they stopped.
Still, I really look forward in seeing what your team can come out with. I love out-of-the-box designs.
One of our teams started this year (skyrise) with a robot without wheels. It got used at one competition. It simply got plopped down on the starting tile and built the skyrise. It was fairly effective at its job, but in the long run we decided to have a mobile robot so that cube scoring could be efficient as well.
For an early season robot it worked really well though.
Their plan is to build a robot that, by the end of the year, will be able to score skyrise sections as well as cubes with a POTENTIAL skills score of over 60 points.
I know that is rather ambitious for a two first year teams that combined have 2 freshmen and the rest are middle school students. I just encourage them to try and do their best. Their plan is feasible. I am eager to see how it all works out. All this with no pneumatics.
The HAND OF GOD was an incredibly ambitious design I saw in Gateway. Essentially they used a ton of rails and elastics to make a mechanism that shot out in a fraction of a second and isolated all the scoring objects from the opponents. Another mechanism abused a portion of the rules with scoring to make the game mathematically un-losable. I don’t think it qualifies being called a “robot” since the cortex just moved a single motor to trigger the expansion. Still cool though.
They requested a special safety inspection due to the massive force of elastics, and the high energy basically broke vex components. I never saw it work
We saw a wheel-less robot at a tournament in October, but it was not very elaborate. It was an arm made of several turntables and c-channels on top of a base plate, but it could only reach 2 or 3 skyrise sections, so it didn’t do very well.
Team 1750 in Oklahoma has a no wheels robot. We have only been its alliance and not opponent but it gets around 57 points in a game. It grabs a cube and peg at the same time and drags cubes over to itself with sideways scissor. They just set it down and it expands to be about 6 foot tall or more, it’s like a skyscraper with a pulley that goes up and down to sum it up.
Anyone happen to have pictures or a video? Sounds like a cool robot. One of my teams started the season with no wheels. It was OK for early tournaments, but we couldn’t make it good enough to get high scores so we ended up scrapping the idea.
It sounds like Team 1750 has figured something out!
