Improving FLL Robot Game. Group the Gecko in the same run. Use a lever to drop it Pro Preview

  • #482
  • 18 Apr 2017
  • 5:57

English

It is possible also to group the two tasks using the same attachment. I'll just add the attachment not like this. That's the attachment for lifting. And it will be a very interesting idea if we can just leave the Gekko while we are lifting the robot. It might be a good idea to use an active attachment. An active attachment will use a number of gear wheels that transfer the power from the motor to an attachment right here at the front and this attachment will somehow leave the Gekko. And that's a feasible solution. It could be done but can we think of a simple one? And a solution where we have a passive attachment, an attachment that's not dependent on the motors but could just get its power from the movement of the robot is something better because it will be much more simple. What we decided to do is to use a very small and very interesting construction that works like a lever. And the idea the this lever is the following. We attach the Gekko on the lever like this and when we are moving to the wall what will happen is that we'll lift

the Gekko and then it will fall and attach on the mission model. Let's say how this works in action. Take the Gekko. Leave it on the lever. Then start the program.

And you see how we group two missions together. We have the Gekko and we have the robot on the mission model. And this is in a single mission and this brings you a lot of points I think like 60 or 70 points was the overall and it's a very very nice and perfect solution. Let's see in more details how this lever works. I've rotated the camera so that you can see it and we have our lever. And the specific details of this length of the axle and the way we attach the Gekko is something that we reach by trial and error. The idea is that we should not lock the Gekko so we should leave it like this and when we push here it will at a certain point fall. Now we can experiment with the length of this axle and this axle and this small mechanism here so for the Gekko and for our robot and for our attachment for lifting these are the lengths that were working. We should also experiment again with the lengths of these beams. But the principle is the same. We have the lever and it has a central point and it's rotating around this central point its axle which is currently a pin and when we push it will just leave the Gekko, lift the Gekko and then drop the Gekko on the mission model. But because the whole robot is in the air and we reach the mission model we then push with the mission model on this lever. Like this. And the small trick here is this blue pin that does not allow the lever to drop too low. Because if we don't have it,

we can again push but what will happen then is when we approach the mission model it will push in this direction. It will not push so that we can lift. And that's the interesting thing about the lever. It's a very standard simple passive attachment that can leave the Gekko. We can also solve this with rubber bands that are triggered the moment we touch the mission model but for rubber bands I'll prefer to direct you to other resources that we have for rubber bands. The important thing as a recap. We have two of the missions and we do these two of the missions 10 out of 10 times each time the first mission is a complex mechanism for lifting the robot while the second is a very simple passive attachment - a lever that just drops the Gekko on the mission model. Let's see it again in action.

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Image for FIRST LEGO League (FLL) 2016-2017 Animal Allies. Review of solutions with explanations
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