We recently competed in the Robot World Cup, held in Auckland, New Zealand, facing some very tough competition against some of the best high school teams in the world. While we are a college team, we followed all of the high school rules for this competition (other than alliances), including only using 10 motors and no custom electronics.
I got to take this thing for a test drive at World Cup. Seriously beefy and solid interaction robot. It sent our robot spinning across the arena in autonomous when we versed you guys XD. Also one of the more successful track intakes that I saw. I loved the way the whole ramp moved forward as it rotated up. Did you guys ever actually use the descoring fork in game? Was it very effective? I imagine certain combinations of objects on certain angles would be a pain to descore with a fork. (eg. Barrel on top of ball with ball inside the barrels concave.)
Are AURA going to use the same type of robots for worlds, or are you guys building entirely new robots for the college rules?
(I’m not sure about the descoring question, but…)
We’re leaving the robots intact for a bit, finishing the rest of semester, sitting exams, and then having another full strategy session to decide our final plan. The most likely outcome is that we will be dismantling all our robots and re-building new robots to suit college rules, as there are some significant changes to our strategy and the potential capabilities of our robots.
Yes we did a couple of times to descore in the middle 30". Also you get the hang of using it effectively and then it becomes nice and easy 99% of the time However, a useful benefit of it was also to block the goal by lifting the arm up and sticking the descorer through the top of the goal to prevent other teams from scoring.
Yeah, I saw Avondale use their descorer for the blocking goals as well. They blocked both 20 inch goals in the autonomous period. (Avondale descoring, rofl) Its a shame I didn’t get to see the effectiveness of the “fork” because I’m redesigning a robot with some kind of descoring mechanism now and i was considering the fork but I rejected it :rolleyes:. I’ve already built my lift, you guys can see it when I next go to a scrimmage. I was determined to not copy Max and I wanted to stay with one tower for my lift, so it ended up looking pretty random. My method of descoring will look pretty cool as well (if it works). While my last robot(s) was going for a “keep it simple” design, this ones a little more ambitious :).
I’m impressed, it’s a straight-forward design implemented really well. You also reinvented the auto-sizing parallel tracks that worked so well in Elevation, and combined them with modern use of pneumatics. Nice.
It hasn’t really been mentioned in this thread, but what made this robot such a beastly interaction robot was that it had six-motor drive with four of those being 393s. the way it was able to have that and still score 30 inches was because of that odd-looking four-bar lift, which meant it was easily able to lift on just two 269s.
Wow, just figured out how the lift works. How did you go about designing that system? You even did that last year, pioneering the 6-bar lift.
Also, it seems ridiculous that it can lift as fast as it does with 2 269s at 1:7; does that somehow make it more efficient than a regular single-pivot or parallel bar lift?
The design actually came from Elevation. In New Zealand there were two robots with a lift method like this from which we took inspiration from in designing this.
The reason why the lift works so well is because the motors, and some of the weight of the intake, is BEHIND the pivot point and essentially acts as a kind of counter-weight for the lift. In addition there were quite a lot of rubber bands At one point during World Cup, it also turned out that one of the 269s on the lift was barely working at all, and for 2 matches the lift had been working on 1x 269 only… It was noticeably slower than normal, but it still worked enough and amazed people when they found out it was essentially a 1-motor lift
In Elevation, there were quite a few robots using a single 3-wire motor to lift twin-belt arms at 7:1. Using latex or rubber bands is the secret. (And there were no 393 motors, either. And teams had to drive their robots 10 miles uphill in the snow.)
No fancy batteries or power outlets back then either, had to hand crank our robots before we put them on the field and hope that they started the games quickly.
However, a useful benefit of it was also to block the goal by lifting the arm up and sticking the descorer through the top of the goal to prevent other teams from scoring.
At one point during World Cup, it also turned out that one of the 269s on the lift was barely working at all, and for 2 matches the lift had been working on 1x 269 only… It was noticeably slower than normal, but it still worked enough and amazed people when they found out it was essentially a 1-motor lift 