Entry 11/15/21
Today, we discussed multiple designs, in one of my designs the intake has changed, which I was talking
about using a intake that is easier to pick up the blocks and balls since it has a massive compliant wheel
which is easier to bend, and makes it easier for the block to go inside the tray, and you don’t have to be
precise, since the compliant wheel can bend and pickup the block from various angles. This was the
sketch that I made the earlier meet. I modified the sketch that I made since, I realized that there wasn’t
enough space to place two motors, and would consume more power, furthermore causing instability.
Thus, I decided to use a single Tetrix motor, and keep the intake using one major supplier, instead of
using channels from GoBilda and causing issues with stability, furthermore I want to make
improvements to the design as the tray isn’t wide enough which would cause the drivers to be more
precise in intaking the block, but if we increase with the width the tray can cover more surface, which
would make it easier when driving, another concern I have with this design is that the Tetrix channels
have to be sturdy, when intaking the block since they might break up loose, and cause the intake to
malfunction.
In these designs, I mainly focused on implementing the design changes on our foundation that we have
currently, which wouldn’t require much change to implement in the original robot, and the autonomous
wouldn’t require much change in-terms of the arm movement. This claw system is inspired by one of the
robot’s that I saw during the meet. This claw would need precision by the drive team and isn’t the most
effective way to approach the solve the problem, furthermore the claw system on the CAD screenshot
isn’t proper for small blocks (4x4), and would need to be similar to the sketch on the right, for this to
work.
This sketch is from Jaswant’s idea which requires many changes to the robot, in terms of chassis and
arm, which mostly changes everything and we start from scratch even in the autonomous. Despite that,
Entry 11/15/21
his idea would work great if we were to take everything apart and start anew, and we could always do
that since we already built our design for this meet and we could rebuild it. So, in his idea there are
compliant wheels at the front of the robot, and the block speeds up to the end of the tray, where a
container will take the block and lift it up and place it from the back, without requiring to turn the robot,
although I believe that using mecanum wheels would reduce this inefficiency paired with high speed
motors. This design was also similar to Vinayak’s idea, but he just used surgical tubes to push the block
to the end of the tray. This is also similar to my idea at the start of the year, but since I had no clue, if we
were able to extend the tray till the end of the chassis, I had the lifting mechanism at the middle and
had another linear slide that would move it till the end.
There was also a container with the door that would allow the block to place from the other side. There
are many caveats with the design since I didn’t actually brainstorm how the tray would function during
that time, but I did know that the intake be lower, because we would be lifting the chassis for the robot
to cover the barrier. When I tried to CAD this design I faced difficulties with the cascading slides, since it
would come as an assembly and I had always had trouble opening assembly files, since they would
merge or break up into several pieces as you could see on the left. I tried opening every part separately,
and it did work, but I wasn’t able to fasten or mate the cascading slides, since it’s made of individual
parts causing it to break apart. To fix this I decided to group the cascading slides, together so as a single
part they were stuck to their original position. Furthermore, I would like to start using a new chassis for
this build (strafer-goBilda).
Entry 11/15/21
Entry 11/15/21
Entry 11/15/21