So quick question im new to the forums but regarding center parking
Center Parked – A Robot status. A Robot is Center Parked when it is:
• Contacting the Center Platform.
• Not contacting any Alliance Platform.
• Not contacting the foam field tiles or white tape.
Would this mean you could potentially make like a rack and pinion that would pull your robot off the ground and hang off of the center platform and be considered as parked?
Like this?
Seems like it would be very difficult. You’re not allowed to grab onto field elements, so figuring out angles and center of mass issues to do this would be nontrivial. But for a short enough base I could see driving beneath the center platform and having a piece extending upward and around that you pull down, thereby raising your robot. Other methods could work.
That’s illegal.
kind of like that but more like how in starstruck people would lift there robot up on the pipe
like i would drive my robot to the side of the center parking have a rack and pinion that would extend up and have a c channel with anti slip mat it would be convex go on the center platform then the rack and pinion would go back in and lift the robot off the tile and all that would be toughing would be the c channel on the center parking spot
My main question is: How does it not tip over, leaving an edge on the tiles below? The center of mass of the whole robot needs to be inside the polygon of contact it makes with the surface unless there is something to provide some some sideways force like the side of the tube in Starstruck.
possible, but not practical.
yeah it would be very difficult to get it to work but is it possible and more importantly is it legal because if there was a way i could include it it would negate the need to fight for the position and needing to climb up saving time along with my teammate and me could both be center parked meaning an easy 12 points just for that
One could put anti-slip mat on the underside of the robot so that, if the robot was pushed partially off of the platform, the robot wouldn’t slide off.
thats what i was thinking but its legal?
I don’t see why not. I can’t wait for official Q&A to come out so we can get rulings on stuff like this.
Even if it is legal, its not as easy as it sounds.
Our team tried to pull a 3 robot climb in FRC this season with ramps coming from opposite sides. Pulling a ramp styled climb requires good drivers, and from a scrimage we attended we only pulled a ramp climb once out of 13 times.
Not to mention there will be rough defensive play for the center park
A center-parked robot must touch the platform, so if you had a forklift-bot or crane-bot to lift your partner, you would then have to get at least a bit of their wheel or chassis to touch the platform surface.
What if you had something that grasped on to your alliance partner’s robot already on the platform and pulled yourself up or something?
Some sort of mechanism that allows you to hang onto the platform over the edge is impossible because you would have to hook onto the other edge of the platform, which is illegal. An idea that could accomplish this same goal is to have an NBN style lift. It picks up your partner, except there is a hole in between the tracks for the robot and your robot. when your partner drives up your ramp, their wheels would fall into this hole and contact the center park, and since they are only touching you and the center platform, and you are only touching the platform, both robots are considered scored
we were thinking about this too. But our main concern is that it might count against us as latching onto field elements.
But it will be great if we can think of a way around this “no-latching” rule 
Biggest thing for that would be finding a way to raise the wheels so that the mat is on the platform
Is it possible to do a high hang thing where we can flip the robot 180? If so then there wouldn’t be any wheels to slide off of right?
Like this
You cannot touch multiple sides of a game object, so it’s legal but risky