Power Play Robot

The Robot Throughout Time

This is our robot, Inspector Gadget. He’s gone through many changes throughout his life, from tweaks to fundamental reimaginings. We’re quite proud of both the journey and the result.

Here’s the final CAD render of our robot!

This year are final arm/lifting mechanism design was a double-four bar lift using Andymark S3 Extrusions, which are very strong. It had great height and accurate cone placement, while doing it faster than most linear lifts.

To lift the double-four bar lift we used a chain. The sprocket ratios are 1:3. We also added brake behavior to the motor. The wheel motor’s ratios are 1:20 and for the arm, 1:60.

To pick up the cone, we didn’t need anything fancy, so we made a simple claw as you can see. We have at least made at five or more claws for our robot! Each claw was different, because with each version of our robot, we needed it to fit a the 18 by 18 size limit. The claw contains two servos, one for each side. We found that a back-stopper, on the claw as shown, really helped improve the claw’s performance.

We used mecanum wheels for easy maneuverability around the junction filled course, because of their ability to strafe, that is to move sideways. We are very thankful for the people who created them!

Bonus Round!

We came up with the idea of a V-shaped junction pole guider as shown directly below:

The V-shaped pole guider turned out very useful, on average giving us the ability to stack 1-2 more cones on the high junction pole during a match. With many regrets and two days before regionals, we found out the V-shaped pole guide was illegal, due to it “controlling/grasping the game element”. We luckily found that an arced, C-shaped pole guider wasn’t illegal, not having two points of contact! So, we quickly printed one on are new 3-D printer we bought this year. It turned out better than having nothing, but wasn’t an exact replacement.

That’s are robot for this year! We hoped you enjoyed this showing! Thanks again to the Pixton parents for all the photos taken of the robot and the team!