As a major part of this year’s game has to do with scoring Power Cell balls into the Power Port goals, our team decided to design a mechanism which could shoot balls into the high goal, which stands around 2.5 meters off the ground. Our team decided that being able to fire into the goal from a variety of positions would be the most efficient way to keep points scored, as well as protecting ourselves from being blocked by enemy or friendly robots alike; which could be a problem if the robot relied on a single firing position.
We decided that our minimum distance should be the Initiation Line on our robot’s starting side (3m away), while our furthest firing position would be at the driver’s side of the Trench Run, which stands over 10 meters away. Our Shooter mechanism team have designed four prototypes, each to answer a different design question. Our newest prototype uses two vertically stacked spinning wheels with a curved ramp around the outside to direct the ball straight into the wheels. We decided to keep the prototype at a set angle of 30 degrees, which allows us to test whether it is viable to change shooting elevation just through changing the speed of the wheel stacks. After a day of testing, we have discovered that changing the speed of the wheels allows us to score into the goal from both our minimum and maximum distance.