Wall Squaring Woes

In our original design plan, the EV3 Intelligent Brick ("Brain") itself was the back of the robot. This meant that we'd run the Brain's bottom edge into the wall if we wanted to square up.

The problem with this was that the sensor cables' clips touched the wall first. When the robot kept backing up, it unplugged its own cables!

So, we added some beams to be standoffs. They hit the wall first, to protect the clips.

The standoffs worked well during our Regional tournament, but none of our runs there actually used wall squaring. None of our programs had the robot back itself into a wall to square up to it. Once we tried adding such a run, we noticed a bad thing. It didn't work!

Those beams just got stuck on the wall. They would need to slide sideways on the wall for the robot to square itself, but they couldn't slide. So, we added some wheels, and that worked great! At least, for a while.

Our very first mission run (which doesn't do any wall squaring) flips the arm from the back of the robot to the front. When we tried this with the wheeled standoffs, we discovered a problem.

We needed to either move the wheels inward (we tried that, but then the robot wouldn't square up), or rebuild the arm. Yuck! But Soren thought maybe we could just rebuild the "easy side" of the arm, which is the side that doesn't have any gears. Soren actually did that in about 10 minutes, and then we had one standoff wheel out far enough to work.

So now, we can successfully wall-square, but only coming at the wall from one side. All of our run plans only need that one side, so we should be good to go!

Before

After

                                                                 Until next time, keep building!