Awesome! Lol that is so cool if it is automatic :3
Otherwise, nice proof of concept?
It automatically controls the launcher based on field position.
It is automatic. The drivers do not ever have manual control except when they are in the emergency override mode.
What sensor did you use for the navigation and how easy was it to work with?
Wow… Good to see you got the code working 
So does it track your field position and change the direction of the turret to keep it aimed at the net? 
Using the positioning code the wheel speed would also vary so you can shoot close range but they might have positions on the field with preprogrammed flywheel speeds
Quad Encoders and the VEX gyro. It was very difficult to work with as the gyro behaves differently than it does in autonomous mode. It took several hundred hours to develop that part of our code, and we are by no means done.
Good luck to you and your incredible persistence.
And congrats on winning your first competition.
http://www.robotevents.com//robot-competitions/archived-seasons/vrc/vrc-2015-2016/re-vrc-15-3403.html
Excellent robot and coding! I love to see somebody else trying to do auto-aiming.
Why do you have the laser pointer next to your launcher? And what are the rubber bands for on the non-wheel surface in the back of your launcher?
Your robot is simply amazing! The design looks neat, clean, and it seems like it has no extra parts at all. It is a piece of engineering art!
And you certainly made a bold statement by putting six motors into the launcher. I didn’t expect teams will make or unveil such decisions until late January, when it would be impossible to hide.
Your and 8059 reveals are very inspiring and easily motivated my team to work half a weekend on a launcher. It was 8059A pictures that got them to focus and build a working intake prototype earlier in the season.
I could see at least one way of transmitting half of your total power for lifting and your design has free space where it is natural to do it. I am sure you will be able to do reliable lifting, in spite all the challenges associated with that.
I think I know what problem with the balls it is supposed to solve. Did you try elastic tubing instead of rubber bands? Did you have problems with balls dispersing from the centreline?
Are you running flywheel all the times? If it is not one of your trade secrets, at what power levels do you run launcher when idle?
Also, you have a little plastic piece for you ratchet and pawl mechanism. Did you experience any reliability problems with it?
Are you using RobotC built-in gyro integrator, or your own, like QCC2 does? I assume you are using QCC2 style code, because by the way you slam into goal bar in one of your videos you must be ruining your gyro solution if you are not resetting integrator at that point.
Have you tried line trackers to correct your true position? Any issues associated with that?
Also, could your launcher pick up balls from intake while it is facing any direction? Could you post more detailed picture of how it is arranged inside? I promise, we won’t copy your design, although it was my first impulse after seeing hires picture of your robot. 
First of all, thank you so much! That is a wonderful compliment, and our whole team appreciates it after how much work we have put into this robot (close to two thousand man hours already).
First of all, I would like to clarify to everyone that we are revealing very little about our sensor and code set up until later in the season, for obvious reasons. We have spent hundreds of hours slowly improving our algorithms. In the spirit of collaboration, we would like to still share as much as we can. I will say that all our sensor fusion and integration code is custom.
I actually don’t control the flywheel, my operator (sort of) does. It is still mostly autonomous. We have safety and kill buttons for just about everything, and the launcher is one of them. But when we don’t override the system, I don’t know what speed it runs at. It’s all on control code which I constantly tweak and rewrite.
No issues with the ratchet mech.
Our team has always tried to share what we are doing as much as possible, perhaps even a bit recklessly at times. It has helped us all when we were new to VEX, and we still benefit greatly from those with more experience who are kind enough to share their knowledge with us. If you see something you like that we have done (or that any team has done for that matter), we request that you do not point-blank copy but instead take the design and improve upon it. Not only does VEX get more competitive, but the world gets better engineers!
Regards,
Luke
EDIT: I wanted to clarify that the final paragraph is directed more generally than at you specifically. I know you understand this from your threads which you had to put so much time into, and incidentally were invaluable in developing our code. Thank you for that!
I have a question regarding your ratchet and launcher control program. If you feel it asks too much, feel free to ignore it.
I would like to ask if there was problems with your flywheel control code. If it is the small piece of polycarbonate that is spinning the wheel, how does the robot auto adjust the wheel to be slower? I would assume that if the motors switched from a high speed to a lower speed, the flywheel would still be spinning at a high speed. How did you account for this?
I am happy to answer almost any question regarding our launcher! The ratchet offers enough friction to transition between speeds. It doesn’t really save any kinetic energy between auton and drivers, but it’s still nice.
Funny you should ask. I spent 4 hours trying to perfect RPM control code last night and still didn’t get it. Maybe today
All I’m saying, is that Bang Bang is the best 
This is probably one of the best looking robots I have ever seen!
The autonomous aiming Idea is something I have been musing over for some months now, its great to see someone actually getting it to work.
How did you manage to wire the flywheel motors to the rest of the robot without continuous entanglement? I can’t see any outstanding wires or other features in the image. Its all wonderfully tidy.
I know that this has already been asked but I do not believe that it was answered. What is the purpose of all the rubber bands on the curved metal part of the flywheel?
I wrote the code already. We shall see later today how good or bad it is. It already seems more promising than the monster function I had before. Lol.
Wire bundles reinforced with standoffs to stay in size. This was ironically one of the most difficult aspects of the mechanics. Thanks for the question!
It serves as a compression point. Sorry I must’ve missed that!
Oh, don’t worry we are not going to copy you point-blank - you still have plenty of interesting stuff hidden behind those banners!
Actually, after seeing your robot’s picture, everybody on our team, except me, wants to build robot with rotating turret. I am still not sure if it worth sacrificing our lift concept and a couple of other things, but keeping constant aim without having to turn entire robot’s body is very very tempting.
As for other people copying your design, I wouldn’t worry about it either. It is very unlikely somebody could build and tune such robot without knowledge and experience you gained spending countless hours improving your design. I think everybody understands there is much more than parts you see in the picture.
For example, if we ever get to build and program our robot the way we designed it, I wouldn’t hesitate to share the pictures. First of all, several crucial technical solutions are not visible, unless you take the robot apart. And even if somebody took it apart, they still wouldn’t know our build and alignment procedures, which in some places are just as important as the parts we have chosen.
You know better than me how much time you already spent and will spend programming your navigation system. Even if somebody gets the source code they still couldn’t do much without understanding your tuning procedures and test cases that went into figuring out all sorts of constants specific to your robot.
At the end of the day, you should be proud of yourself not only for building cool robot, but for revealing its design this early in the season to inspire others. Same goes to 8059A, 1727B, and a few more teams that escape my mind at the moment (there was one with tilting launcher axles ans super secret launch angle…)
There is a goal not only to win tournaments as an individual team but to help others in building nearly perfect robot to beat the game itself. It takes entire community to do that.
And finally, I got a good news today. Even though we haven’t built anything functional yet, I think we could beat 323Z to launching three balls per second with just three motors. I am pretty confident we could get our launcher’s friction that much under control.
3 balls per second :eek:. That is amazing!
That sounds epic! I can hardly wait to see that!
I’m not sure what our fire rate will be up to after our thanksgiving break launcher rebuild. Not 0.3 seconds though. Lol.
Hey, my kids can do that, too!
Three balls.
One second.
Two inches.