Sack Attack Autonomous

New 357 Autonomous

We now have a successful autonomous.  Our simple mechanism is able to score 3 to 4 sacks in autonomous and has a very successful driver control period.  We will be attending the Dover Air Force Base competition and we are coming to compete! We have come to a complete design and are very happy. We will be a strong competitor at the event.

Meeting of 9-22-2012

Scissor
We are nearing the Dover Air Force base competition, so everything Vex is in overdrive. The scissor lift bot is up and running. We routed all of the PWM cable through the frame, adjusted the code to accommodate the physical changes. A drastic change done to the bot in the past couple of weeks was the spatula has been upgraded to have an active intake. After a few trial runs, we found that the intake was not intaking as much as we would have hoped. To fix this, we began work on way to allow for the intake to adjust its height to allow more sacks.

Things to note / updates quick list

• active intake
• side walls
• new spatula arm
• thinner tray w/o spaces
• smaller frame

Things to be done before competition

• add a back wall
• finish intake
• finish engineering notebook

Spatula

The main thing being done is coding. Only small physical changes have occurred. 

Meeting of 8-16

Scissor Lift Bot:
Tonight, we mainly focused on getting the spatula to pick up and deliver sacks to the tray.
So far, the spatula has no problem picking up the sacks, but, the delivery is somewhat of an issue. It will be resolved the next time we get a chance to work on it. (Most likely not this Saturday)

The spatula is being powered by a 1:5 ratio using 2 269 motors. 

For the next meeting, we plan on trimming the top of the spatula arm and adding something in the front of the base to prevent sacks from entering the base.

Spatula Bot:

The robot itself did not receive much mechanical work. The main focus was on programming autonomous. The students working on this bot also added a limit switch that will trigger when it reaches the underside of the trough. Unfortunately, there were no videos taken.

Meeting of 8-11

Today, my mentor, Ryan, and I worked on a scissor lift concept.
Each side of the lift is powered by a high strength 2-wire motor. The motor drives a 12-tooth gear into a stationary 60-tooth gear.
Atop the lift is a tray comprised of tread. This tray will have sacks put onto it by a spatula.

After we finished building the lift, we tested to see how many sacks it could handle lifting:

(5 sacks)

(10 sacks)

`(15 sacks)

(20 sacks)

Please note that this is just a build concept, not the final design. There is still much mechanical work to be done so stay posted.

Spatula Bot

We have created a new mecanum drive with our new spatula mechanism.

This robot is now performing quite well even at its early stages.

Note that this is not a complete robot and will still be subject to change.

Also we are trying some "unique" ways to fit into the 18*18*18 in box

 also note that there were some "operator errors" during this video

New Mechanisms

Mechanisms

We have been trying out some spatula design intakes.
Here are some cool pics of our design.

The Mechanism is composed of a polycarb plate to slide under and lift sacks.

After testing we have found the spatula to be very successful on its own but the tower is not fully complete for testing.

06/02/12 Intake Mechanism Tests

Stand off mechanism

We have been working on a mechanism which uses stand off intake rollers to catch the sacks easier.
We tried the mechanism in several different ways.

Intake at different angles:

We found that while flat on the ground the sacks got stuck on the intake. 

However when we put the intake at an angle it had a much easier time with the sacks.

Intake multiple sacks:

Although this video was not very accurate, we found that the intake was able to successfully intake multiple sacks.

Intake attached to Vexter drive:

In order to fully test the mechanism we attached it to our mecanum drive.
Overall the mechanism was successful and will be further tested.