Kicker in slow motion

Submitted by istvan.burbank on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 23:57

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Here is our kicker, named 'Tongues of Death' mounted to our robot during testing. This is shot at 600 frames per second, slowed down to 24 (so this is 1/24th real speed).
The kicker's 'tongues' spin inside a robot, while a grate covered in memory foam hold the ball out our reach of the kicker. When the kicker is fired, two pistons push the spinning tongues forward to contact the ball and kick it, while also dis-engaging the motor. The kicker has a wheel that is in contact with another wheel on the motor before the kicker is fired, however when the kicker assembly moves forward the motor stays stationary and the wheels loose contact so that kick-back from the impact with the ball doesn't damage the motor.

The kicker is running at insane speeds. In one of the tests in this video it takes one second for the kicker to make a full rotation, ie about 25 frames. Because this is slowed down, it means in reality the kicker spins at about 25 rotations per second, which is 1440 RPMs! These speeds are variable, the controller has power settings 1-11 on our control board. This ranges from a tap to kicking over a bump and into the goal from the middle of the field.

I hope you enjoy this video, there will be videos of the whole robot in action shortly, Istvan.