I was just wondering, as I’d seen this design on YouTube, how well a pneumatic claw without stanchions underneath had worked for some of you. I was considering this idea because I’d like to be able to grab objects by coming down over them (which cannot be done with stanchions) but I was concerned that low air pressure could be more of a concern when only the sides of the claw were holding objects, and not any stanchions. Do you guys have problems with running out of air, to those of you who rock this design? Thanks for your input!
Well, I will say that the stanchions (fancy word, I like it) can be designed in a way that still allows you to grab most objects by coming down over them. With give and elasticity in the right places, you might be able to create something like our setup, where we can drop the claw on top of a cube and still be able to pick it up.
Though to answer your question more directly, our robot has never had air problems in matches, even in earlier iterations without the bottom mini-fork (our terminology). The only problem is that bigger clumps of 5-6 stars sometimes fall through the middle if the support from the claw is not evenly spread, but some tuning can probably fix this problem too.
Shoot - I forgot that everyone else calls them standoffs.
I could see this being possible with a cube, but big groups of stars are a little weirder. Also, our pneumatic claw doesn’t really hold the objects so much by holding them tight (necessarily - it’s still strong) so much as just holding the sides of a “basket,” more or less. So I don’t think that having standoffs that can bend up when going down on objects (which is what I’m assuming you’re talking about, as that’s how our sister team did it temporarily) is a viable solution in our case. I think we will make the standoffs a little shorter, however. We decreased our capacity (which we usually didn’t make full use of) in favor of a little more speed, but the standoffs are still just as long as before. It’s kind of unnecessary.
Yeah, I imagined that would be an issue. I did a motorized claw earlier and it certainly was. I was mostly asking this to see if this would be a viable one-week change with our current claw which using pneumatics, but I probably don’t have time to tune a new claw and I should definitely get some better autonomous routines programmed instead. I may experiment with a motorized claw after State, assuming we make Worlds, now that our focus has shifted to speed over high capacity.
Thanks for your input!