CSM Gateway Ideas

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC > Previous Games
#1

So here are the strategies and brainstorming ideas for team CSM’s gateway robots. This is what we have so far.

Isolation zone robot:

Possiblely a stationary robot similiar to Aperture’s but with 2 arms rather than 1. these arms would also have just enough length to reach the farthest goal in the cluster of 6 instead of being redundantly long. For the arm joint near the base we would use pneumatics to produce a crankshaft in order to generate the torque required to lift a roughly 60 inch arm. a stationary bot can have 10 pneumatic tanks since it isnt going anywhere.

Interaction zone robot:

We are considering a swerve drive using the new small turntables and the swerve drive kits. I believe somebody else in the vex community (Chris is me?) is working on one already. This would mean no omni wheels are necessary and we could use different wheels. like vexplorer wheels or an 18 tooth high strength sprocket wrapped in the high traction rubber links.

Then for scoring there is the idea of making a one way vertical cylinder to pick up objects. picture green egg’s round up bot needle. where objects could go up it but not down. they were only able to fall when the pneumatics were engaged (we would use double acting rather than single acting pistons for ours though). this would allow us to dump every object we are carrying in a goal very fast. rather than spitting them out one at a time.

Speaking of scoring, thats where the next part comes in. In the college competition we can “interact” with the gates as much as we want. meaning we could wedge something in the gap between the gate poles to stabilize the robot, then reach over and score in a goal. definitely the 2 nearest 20" goals. one of which is in our oppents isolation zone. opening up another goal we can score in. and then it would also be able to reach up and score in any of the 4 closest 30" goals. which would be very useful.

Alternate ideas:

The new gyro (or a non-vex gyro since were college) could enable a 2 wheeled robot. not sure exactly the application for that yet.

we have also talked about an isolation zone robot that quickly rushes forward and covers all 6 of the 30" goals. then “locks” itself in place. you should be able to sink some rack and pinion sliders in the inside of the 5 goal pipes.

if a similiar idea was used for our isolation zone robot as that of the interaction zone bot i mentioned above, we could reach over and score in our opponents 20" goal from our isolation zone. if this was also done with our interaction bot, between both robots we could score in all 10 goals. would be especially useful for the last 30 seconds with those doubler and negation barrels.

now this idea would be very difficult to achieve, but would be awesome if it worked. we build a pneumatic powered or rubber band/tubing powered cannon that could (with some calculations) throw a ball in the air, across the field, and into a goal. make the most of those 4 match load balls.

something similiar would be if we made that same cannon, but used it to knock over the large wall of scoring objects in the interaction zone. that way we could knock it over from either zone and wouldnt even have to touch it.

Mechanical ideas:

something that might be useful is the capibility to have a “boost” when we needed it. Ive mentioned a pneumatic crankshaft above in this post and also in other threads. if we had a device that both removed all motors from our drivetrain while simulateously deploying a pneumatic crankshaft in to it, we could have great speed and torque when we needed it, but only for limited times. i could see this possibly being useful in the high school skills challenge. for covering great distances quickly.

we might also use (somewhere in one of our robots, not sure yet) an adder subtractor. basicly its 2 inverted differentials connect on one side by an even amount of gears and connected on the other by an odd amount. meaning our robot could move in perfectly straight lines but still retain the ability to turn. this would most likely be more cool than useful. and it is slightly complex. but its just an idea for now.

Here is a rough sketch of our interaction zone robot :stuck_out_tongue:

so yes, I believe thats it for right now. comments, criticism, and questions are all welcome. :slight_smile: thank you for taking the time to read this somewhat long post.

-Ryan

#2

I’d like to see how your going to imply dual arms that extend to 60 inches. I would be incredibly worried they would intersect each other while operating. I do like the idea just scared things would hit each other.

Swerve drives are fun, but you have to consider there will be delays in the rotation of the wheels and delays to change directions. I do like the ideas thought but we will probably do something a bit different :stuck_out_tongue:

I have lost where i was going with this post Ill post later if i think of something again…

-Andrew

#3

I agree it could happen. It is something we will have to work around.

And yes, swerve drives are fun :smiley: I feel like it would be easier on our motors because they dont have to completely stop then reverse their direction when we want to turn around.

#4