1/19/2014 Day 15: Beginning of Week 3 and Time to Judge Prototype Robot

As yesterday the robot was modified based on what happened early in the morning, it was time to test everything again with the modifications.  We pulled out the carpet (what the robot drives on at competition) and the wood/rope truss we made (didn't quite finish the wooden high goal yet, but fairly close to done) and setup on the docks, so we could test general mechanisms, and make sure everything works the way it is supposed to.  Pictured below is the prototype robot with a couple students and a mentor.

Shooter

As can be seen (or not seen) in the picture above of the robot, the shooter takes up very little space, and cannot really even be seen from a front view, although the ball is currently sitting on it (the front of the shooter peeks out a little, but not much.  After attaching the latch to pre-pressurize the shooter, the shooter worked much better, shooting around 18' on average, and had one shot of 20'.  In addition, each of the shots went over the practice truss easily, and had the right height to score in the high goal (bottom of high goal is only 8" above the top of the truss).  While this worked for now, we decided this was the best it could do, but that means it isn't strong enough for our requirement of scoring from the white zone in autonomous mode. Because of this, we decided the pneumatic shooter is not the way to go, and surgical tubing is much better, since adjusting power is a matter of putting on more or taking off more surgical tubing.  Also, the maximum power for the surgical tubing catapult just depends on how strong the steel bar on top is, and the indicator of too much is the bending of the conduit.

Intake

Since we had everything out, we retested the intake with less coarse plastic, so more of it was in the middle. Unlike what we thought, that didn't do much, and just did the same as making a smaller intake, since the ball has to be picked up with the middle of the intake, so any ball that hit the side would not get pulled in.  While this was somewhat disappointing, we came up with an idea of having rollers on the sides also.  This would easily solve the problem of the ball getting rammed into the structure, as it would quickly roll the ball into the middle of the intake.  To test the idea, the only things needed would be a small motor, a small wheel, and extra motor controller, so we were ready to start designing this by tomorrow, since the day was already beginning to end by this time.

Drive Base

As the drive base was now decided upon to be wide, we were just waiting for the new kit of parts to come in the mail.  We wanted to keep this 32'x32' base together as something to test the intake and the shooter, then cut it once the other drive base is finished, and get the currently built one anodized.  As of now, everything on the base works well, and there is space for mounting everything.

Catcher

Today was the first day in a while we worked on the catcher.  As we already had the folding sides idea prototyped, we just had to build a prototype a folding out corners idea, which we did out of PVC pipe and PVC crosses.  The difference in surface area was very noticeable, as the surface area of the robot frame with the catcher folded in was about a quarter of the surface area with the catcher folded out.  This presents a huge target for other teams and human players to hit, at approximately 20 square feet, as opposed to the tiny 5 square foot 23"x32" area before.  This shows the general concept can definitely work, and it's just a matter of figuring out how to mount it after everything else is mounted.

Approximate times of working: 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM