:: Inventor4Life ::

Want to get into the 2004 Mills Robot, and see what it take to put it all together? take a look for yourself. These are the result of six weeks of hard work by the Mills Robotics Team (R).

Strategy Development: Well, the way we saw it, if we wanted to amass as many points as possible, there were only two ways of going about doing this: either we try to hang on the bar at then end and get 40 points bonus; or we cap the goals (preferably the the tall stationary goals which can hold more balls) with the multiplier ball, which we estimated could get us about 80 more points than if we had just filled the basket.

Seeing as how, in past years, we've never built an arm that would be able to lift much of anything, the more conservative members of the team were partial to the "bar" strategy while the more ambitious members favored the "ball" strategy. Obviously, if we could succeed at the "ball," then it would be better than the "bar" (and doing both would be neither techically nor strategically, feasible). Well, by the time the dust had settled, we finally decided that the "ball" was the way to go. Here's how we're going to do it:

UPDATE: Just for fun, I created some documents which give our mass properties using Inventor. The weight is off, but probably the COM and moment data are pretty close. At competition, we weighed in at 128.9 lbs or something like that. Click here to download. In the msword doc, the origin is in the center of the motor mount plate, which is about 4.5" off the ground.

Unlike those posted in the galleries, I created these images specifcally for posting on the net.

Preview how we're going to dominate this year's competitions with these animations. Better than VR helmets.