I would say the best way to call it, or at least what I call it, is DR4B tilter (Tray could be vague, though probably not).
I think stacking on stacks has it’s strengths, but having a really long tray that can hold like 14-15 cubes is honestly just as viable. you trade versatility for speed, stacking on stacks is more versatile, while big stacks are quicker.
also, there must be a point where you don’t need to stack any taller, you do have 3 goal zones. ideally you want to be stacking more than half of the cubes on the field, so 33, that’s just 3 stacks of 11-12. you could also lower your necessary stack height if you play towers to your advantage.
usagi is the name of @meepmeepme’s robot,
Ok Lift tray / Usagi same difference. Keep it on topic.
The videos show very impressive stacks for this time in the season!
But how reliable is the depositing of the stack on stack? In addition to requiring tilter / roller outtake coordination and it now needs drivers (or software) to control for the height of the DR4B.
I would imagine that it takes driving skills well above average and nerves of steel to do it reliably time after time during the heat of the competition.
Original post:
@DRow could you, please, flex your admin muscle and do a global edit on this topic?
Some teenagers might find it funny at the moment to use ambiguous language, but is not relevant to this topic of otherwise impressive robots showcased in the OP.
Usagi are great at fighting for towers. They can cache many cubes and quickly swap cubes in and out. They’re basically the best combination of ramps and tube robots
from what I understand, their own weaknesses are
- slower stacking speed (when stacking on top of existing stacks)
- potential tip hazard?
- weaker drive than 4 motors
- lower cube capacity (from existing videos/reveals)
edit: spelling
I mean we cant just assume a tray lift has to have a <4 motor drive, there are other ways to accomplish this design without sacrificing on the drive. Albeit, that is probably the best place to sacrifice a motor on.
I designed a transmission between the lift and the drive because I assumed that the lift wouldnt be used the same time the robot would be driving. On cad, it’s 4 motor drive, 4 motor lift 2 motor intake 1 motor tilter 1 motor spare
When you use the lift do you hear ‘deja vu’ playing in the distance or do you see an unusual amount of motion blur?
(nice.)
We are building a different design and dont have enough extra parts to build such an experiment.
Lifting/lowering while driving saves time. If anything, I’d pull a motor off the lift and make that slightly slower to make up for the drive speed (though 3m drive seems like it’s going okay for a lot of people).
Alternatively, we could see tillers somehow linked to the intake or somehting, but combining related mechanisms tends to not go well.
Depending on how the transmission is made, you could run the lift while also running the drive, just both will be at half speed (or one at quarter speed and one at 3 quarter speed etc.)
A lot of criticisms of tray-on-lift designs are based around either the drive or stacking-on-stacks being unviable: I think something we have to consider for both these criticisms is that this is not an easy robot to build or operate. With a less skilled/practiced driver, or a less proficient builder, a basic traybot is always going to perform better; however, I believe tray-on-lift is a very good option for high level teams, there are just too many advantages. And when criticizing the drive, we have to remember that this is a different game from TP. From the matches I’ve watched recently, most of the defense has not involved head-on pushing matches, it’s been more focused on disrupting robots trying to score in towers by pushing from the side, which won’t be affected by comparing drive strengths. Tray-on-lift is already more effective at towers than goofy(tray with 2 bar); I don’t believe significantly more effective defense can be played on a tray-on-lift compared to a goofy. And if drive torque is a huge problem, these robots could use 3.25" wheels for additional torque without losing too much speed, or use some kind of transmission, as people have suggested.
tl;dr I don’t expect this robot to be the most common design, but it’s a valuable option for high level teams that can work around the drawbacks.
DRow coming in with that global edit. Good decision.
Tubes cannot open, so they are height limited to as high as they can go. Make a tube that opens and expands vertically to stack like usagi.
Also, tubes and claws dont often inhale blocks like trays, so if they could develop a way to quickly get them into the tube/claw that would improve their abilities.
Or put a cage on usagi to prevent the blocks from falling out/forward as it tilts. If you can create a slip gear for the tilter, then you could use additional motor rotations to drive a gear that only meshes when the tilter is straight up. A lot of work, but if we had 9 or 10 motors, this year’s game would be way crazier.
aggreed stuff like this would have far less of a drawback if we had 2 extra motors because then
4m drive, 2m intake, 2m lift and 1m tilt and 1 more motor that could help anywhere