The Cap Bot was a good concept but failed in competition. It’s concept was to cover the opposing goals so that the opponents could not score, but itself and its partner could score.
Each of the 2 arms was lifted by a 1:25 gear ratio with one arm having a Bucky ball pneumatic grabber, and the other having a motorized claw to pick up large balls.
It went 2-7 in our local league, because it took a long time to unfold, could not go over the bump, and gave up winning the autonomous bonus to get to its position so it was decided that it would be abandoned. May it rest in peace.
Please tell me you didn’t take this apart already. You have an okay concept here, it just needs some tweaking. Sacrifice scoring, and gear the base up. 2:1 is perfect with 6 motors. You could live with 1:1.414 X-Drive, if you wanted to still only use 4 motors. Write some Autonomous code, and set up in the first 7-10 seconds of the match. The capper arms should be sped up, too. Put pneumatics as gates on the top instead of motors, and use the extras to reduce that gear ratio.
I love defensive robots. It would be great to see a few more during the season. At the moment, I’ve seen just about everything posted and no one seems to be making them. You all want to see the end of design convergence? Make people design in fear of wallbots. The standard solutions go out the window when you can’t score in the cylinders, or can’t get to your hanging bar during the last minute of the match. Imagine not being able to do either. For the full 2 minutes.
This is the kind of thing that we should be encouraging in VEX. It’s a creative solution to the design problem, and changes the dynamics of the match. Anyone else have suggestions to improve this thing?
Oh, you should keep this. Make it godly. There’s so much potential to change the way people play the game with designs like this. Catapults become viable, because they can’t get to the Cylinders anyway. Perhaps you want a robot that has the power to push this out of the way on your alliance, or you write a program to stop it from setting up somehow. The strategy this leads to, the point-counterpoint is so much fun.
Don’t do the obvious 6-bar, side roller intake with a 1:5 (or 1:7) lift and 1.6 speed drive. Do something different. Make this work.
That is basicly our moto. We never do the same designs as anyone else does. We want something that others will remember and can pick out from a crowd. When we were talking redesign, we said that we would not do an spinning intake, or 6 bar so we decided on a chain elevator to score and hang.
At these earlier competitions it is hard to be purely defencive because it is unlikly that you will get a partner that can score well, but I hope that later in the season we can bring this back for the state championship.
Well you can’t really expect people to reveal nuclear robots before worlds. The whole strength of a purely defensive robot is the surprise factor. If you give other teams enough time, they will engineer a counter.
Last season for example, I made some modular scoops that I could attach onto my robot to get under the troughs as quickly as possible in the case of a wallbot. I never ended up facing a wallbot so they were never used, but in the case that I did end up against one I would’ve had a better chance due to people revealing their defensive designs on the forums.
An example of an enormously successful defensive robot which benefited from secrecy is 2W, which qualified for worlds with a fairly generic scoring robot as far as I know, and then took a beast of a defensive robot to worlds. If 2W was revealed months before worlds, I bet it wouldn’t have done anywhere near as well.
I’m guessing the only reason 536C has posted this to the forums is because the current version didn’t really work :D. I can’t wait to see what they have by next April though IF they keep developing this design. It’s a cool idea for sure. If they stick with the decision to abandon the design then I wish them the best of luck on their new high scoring endeavours!
I dont think you guys should trash this design yet. If anything, trash the scoring capabilities all together, beef up the arms, and make the drive so its fast enough to get to the stashed goals quickly as well as over the bump. Add some sort of breaking mechanism too, so pushing isnt possible. There are so many ways you guys could go with this. Since you guys would be the only cap bot in our region this year that I know of, you definetly would stand out, which you claim to be your team’s motto. Good luck with whatever you choose to do though!
That is correct. I was hoping that others could be inspired by this and try a design themselves.
We kept 90% of it together in case we would want to go back to it. We just could not build a 6 bar because that is what everyone has and it not unique so we are building another robot that is unique (as far as I know) in the region. It will be at league on Thursday.
I actually brought this robot into a discussion with a few other teams in my region, because of it’s uniqueness. we were having a discussion on the most popular/best design, and i brought this up to show that there are good robots that arent of popular design
