So in case you didn’t get to see our robots at World Champs, here are some close-up pictures of one of the two twins, Chups (Fush got broken in our last match, so we dismantled it when we got back to use the parts again).
Some of the special, slightly more unique features:
– A “six-bar linkage” which is based on a traditional 4-bar, and gives the arm much greater height. Our arm was able to reach 32″ without any problem with the six-bar linkage rather than the four-bar. The photos below also show the sheer number of gears that were used to get the arm lifting with enough power to lift a goal.
– Lynfield drive, using 1x 269 for each of the back strafe wheels, and 2x 393s for each of the two forward wheels, geared at 1:1 on torque setting.
– The use of ‘line followers’ as line detectors rather than followers (which is why they are so far apart) – this makes the autonomous much more versatile and much less prone to error (i.e. a line following program is much more likely to miss once and head off the line in comparison to a line detecting program which only has to find the lines and then continue driving) – we used this to get the robot perpendicular to a line before driving forward.
– We used potentiometers to limit the motion of the arm so that it wouldn’t damage the parts. Other sensors that we used were shaft encoders, ultrasonic sensors, line followers, and touch sensors.
– It might be difficult to tell from these photos, but our robots were goal lifters as well. (These photos show this mechanism more clearly: https://www.aura.org.nz/archives/534). By lifting the arm, our scoop was lowered to the ground. The robot would then drive into the goal, and we would lower the arm, raising the scoop and thus also lifting the goal. The scoop was angled at the top of it’s path so that the goal would then fall out the back of the robot through gravity. Our robot scored rings, descored the top rings, lifted goals, and then dumped them under the ladder during autonomously reliably.
– “Front sucker” intake, which was great for picking up stacks of rings and then scoring them as a stack. Additionally it was helpful for descoring stacks of rings off a goal as well.
If you have any questions about the robots, feel free to e-mail us at [email protected]
Here are two short videos too (apologies for having to turn your head 90 degrees anti-clockwise):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4Hv4zZVadg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whcpF7Xo3sE