After seeing the release yesterday, I had a quick robot design pop up in my head. I’ll try to put in words
Cube Picker-Upper/Manipulator:
Have two sets of two conveyor belts/tank treads, which will sandwich the cubes. The first set will be parallel to the ground, and funnel the cubes in. The second set will pick up the cubes, and hold them in the robot vertically (this set will run perpendicular to the ground).
With this design, the robot can hold a total of 4 cubes:
- three stacked vertically, because the conveyor belts which pick up the cubes
- one cube can be stored in the first stage “funnel”
The second aspect of the robot design is the lift. I think a dr4b would be too flimsy, so a scissor lift is something which can help balance out the weight of the robot, since the side picking up cubes will always be heavier. Although a scissor lift takes up quite a bit of space on the chassis of the robot, this is okay because there aren’t any other mechanisms really needed on the bot.
The last aspect of the bot is the chassis/drivetrain. I think that an X-drive would be really efficient when maneuvering around the field, but they take a lot of tuning (in my experience). The next best idea I had was an H-Drive, where you have the normal chassis configuration of 4 wheels, but also an omni perpendicular to these so that you can drive sideways. I think that this deisgn would make it tremendously easier to stack the cubes, especially since they have no way of locking on each other and you need to be precise.
Please give me your thoughts on this design and maybe others which you had.
Finally, I’m moving up to high school division this year, any tips?