VEX Starstruck
Robotics //
The Starstruck challenge consisted of a large wall that divided the field in two, a multitude of foam 'jacks' and four foam-filled cubes. Each team was restricted to their own side of the fence, and a team won by throwing the jacks and cubes on to the opponent's side of the fence, with extra points for getting them to the far end of the opponent's side. As well, a team could get even more points if they were able to lift themselves up by grabbing a vertical pole. This year was my teammate's final year, and we were hoping to do our best this year.
Lift: Our design for this year was based around the idea of flinging the jacks and cubes over top of the bot and over the fence. To accomplish this goal, we built a simple bar lift that would lift the 'stars' and cubes over the top of the bot. Powering the lift was the next challenge, as we wanted to use a transmission system so that we could use the same motors to get the bonus for lifting the robot off of the ground. This was the first year that I attempted to design a transmission system, and unfortunately there was too much friction in it for it to be a viable option. Our next plan was to use a slip-gear system to power the arm, so that it would launch the scoring objects further. To build this we used worm gears that could be disengaged using pneumatics, and the system was able to withstand a surprisingly large amount of torque, but not quite enough to launch the scoring objects as far as we wanted it to. After both of these designs failed we set our goals a bit lower and built a simple six motor direct-drive system that was very reliable.
Hybrid Intake: The first intake design that we went with was a forklift, that could passively pickup multiple stars or a cube. This design was good, but if the stars were too close to the edges they would fall off, and sometimes the cubes wouldn't stay on the forks either. Our solution to this problem was to add claw arms to the forklift. At first we used pneumatics to power them, but later designs of the robot had them being powered by motors. With the addition of the claw arms, the robot was able to lift two cubes at a time easily, and in practice it was able to lift three cubes at once.
At every competition we went to we did fairly well, but the drive system had trouble dealing with the rest of the robot, and at the provincial competition the robot's electrical system broke down for unknown reasons, preventing us from going to the world championships.