Our friends on team 6581S ranked 8th in their division at Nationals, but no one picked them as an ally because the top teams all had prearranged alliances. So, I decided to do a partial reveal to show teams our stuff before Worlds.
My teammates won’t allow me to post too many details, but the design philosophy is this: score in any goal we want to, no matter how high or well defended it is. Our robot weighs 25lbs, and has a drivetrain consisting of 4 internal-torque 393s geared 1:1 to six wheels. This makes Steve an excellent pusher.
Our robot is primarily an interaction zone robot. It has an intake capacity of 4 objects. It’s not a peak efficiency bot, but it is good at scoring first in the center goal and our side’s 11.5" goal. Once we’ve exhausted our match loads, we can pick up more pyramid objects and either pass them to our partner or enter the isolation zone and score them ourselves. We can also bother our opponents by stopping them from scoring/passing objects, and also by going over to their isolation zone and scoring/defending.
Our robot is great with special barrels. We’re very skillful with a doubler, and we’re also good at barging through defending opponents to utilize our negator. We’re also good at defending from opponents’ negators.
We hope all of you with peak efficiency robots think of us during alliance selection! We’re a great asset to fast-scoring robots. And we have many strategies up our sleeves that we haven’t revealed here…
EDIT: Our autonomous is very good at scoring in the center 30". It’s won us 2 Think Awards!
The 581 is just they way Michigan State University numbers the teams it sponsors. Our school actually only has one team. 1581H is our number from last year, because last year all of the MSU-sponsored teams had the number 1581. But then MSU was asked to give each of the schools it sponsors its own number, so our number shifted from 1581H to 7581H (and our friends from a different school went from 1581S to 6581S, etc). MSU’s first ever sponsored school, 1581A, got to keep 1581.
Ahh, I see. Well, it looks like a great robot. My only concern is that the scissor lift appears to be quite bendy when raised all the way. Otherwise the scissor lift looks great, and appears to be quite fast considering the 1:21 ratio. I also like the powerful base. Great Job!
Thanks! We prefer to call the bending “forward reach.” The flexibility actually helps us a lot during autonomous or while trying to score in a defended goal. Our intake can be only part-way over a goal, and then the lift will bend forward or backward while we’re dispensing our objects, making it more capable of scoring than an inflixible vertical-intake bot.
We have lots of elastic on the lift, and the biggest pieces at the top are aluminum, making it fast-ish, but it’s also very strong due to the gear ratio.
We had “fun” with scissor lifts last year. If there is one thing I recommend, if you put lubricant on the sliders, make sure you clean it off nicely before you put some more. Last year, we put WD-40 on our sliders, and we never cleaned them off. It got stuck to the sliders and then they would not even budge.
Looks like you guys did pretty good this year. I watched almost every one of your matches at Worlds, and it was pretty cool. You guys preformed very well at Worlds.
