I’ve watched some combat robotics, and some of them include bonuses for “unconventional locomotion”. I was wondering, what if VRC did this? It would encourage creativity to some degree if the bonus was worth it (like maybe extra watts of motors or a bigger starting limit)
Can you give some examples of “unconventional locomotion”?
I’ve seen the great pneumatic drive system that was recently posted, both full track (tank) and 1/2 track drive (wheels in the front, track in the back), the now illegal “leg wheels”, holonomic in both the X and + configurations, 3 wheel Kiwi and a really weird T drive that had driven omni wheels on the ends of the T and then a driven omni in a swerve cage at the base of the T.
I actually like this alot tbh, like an extra 5.5 or 11 watts of power would be likely worth it but i dont think that extra size would be worth tbh. maybe even 16.5 watts honesty depending on what is considered unconventional bc that would allow u to have an extra 11 for the base to counteract the downsides and inevitable power inefficiencies of that kind of base along with an extra 5.5 to give another manipulator.
Other things they could give are maybe like some extra plastic to your limit, an increase in max psi in your system or another tank(im not sure but i believe the tanks are made to contain more than 100 psi and that limit is only there for game ballance reasons), or maybe even if you want to be exciting with it an extra 5 seconds of autonomous(like b4 or after the 15 everyone gets idk if thats doable with the field control systems or not tho).
Overall love the idea as it is something i have thought about myself and id love to hear more potential bonuses for this concept.
It was meant to be ambiguous to encourage ideas of the constraints, and I didn’t want to constrain those possible ideas.
However, what I had in mind was something along the lines of “does not use wheels or tracks to contact the ground in a manner that moves the robot”. Personally, if I were to go for one, I would do a “crawler” bot (idk what they’re called) that uses a system of gears and screw-gear joints to move a set of 3-4 legs in each instance in a circular or arc-like fashion (this’ll probaby turn into my off-season project)
Dig through the forum, there are a number of posts from people that have made walking robots. I recently came across one that used two V5 (and vexlink) to be able to manage the compute power. The physical robot was a lot like the Boston Dynamics dog. It used the heavy duty turntables as joints to give it extra strength.
Good luck on your quest!
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