So here we go! I am doing this competition at school to win a chance at being part of the VEX teams at our school (they only allow 5 out of 15+ people). We each have 10 weeks to build our own robot that will go through a course and the goal is to get as many points as you can.
One of the most effective ways of earning points are by shooting ping pong balls into a scoring mat on the floor. What are some possible ways for me to get the ping pong ball into my robot and then shooting it out onto the mat?
One thing you could do is intake as many ping pong balls as possible and drive into the scoring mat (I am thinking of this as a low goal sort of thing, so tell me if I’m wrong) once on the scoring mat you can have some latch or something that opens from the bottom that makes it so all the balls you have drop onto the goal at once.
Do the balls have to stay on the mat? are there walls to the mat? how big is the gap from the end(top) of the ramp to the mat, if there is any? If there isn’t a gap between them and the mat doesn’t have a wall blocking it, you could do the thing about having a latch but on the front instead of the bottom, to just drop all the balls forward out of the bot into the mat. Otherwise, you could make a big catapult of a flywheel to shoot the balls. Also, if there isn’t a possession limit, try to make a large chamber which can hold lots of pong pong balls and collect as many as you can along the course.