Interesting Mechanisms – 2024

It’s great to see all the robots that different teams brought to Worlds. Here are some of our favourites.

Leo: 14179 Sushi Squad
3 stage stacked claw that was designed to only pick up 2 pixels by squishing other pixels out.

Ryan: 18139 Rebel Robotics
Their robot has a compact tape measure rolling arm. It allows for minimal space to be occupied while having long reach.  The material of the ‘tape’ rolls into a tube as it extends out from the robot.

Jason: 11754  EnergySmart FTC
Their claw had a unique design, similar to ours, but instead of having a side-by-side centerpost with pincers mechanism, they had a mold like thing that would grasp all around their pixels. It would hold one pixel in the front and one in the back with two of our claws on each side; as if they were pincers; that could rotate around a wrist, making it in any orientation possible. The wrist would allow the pixels to be placed horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. In addition their arm can extend to ~3 ft.

Max: 11228 OverClucked Bots
Really cool scoring mechanism. It pinches the inside of a pixel and releases with a servo. 

Jasper: 18031 Horcruxes
Mostly made their own frame, not much channel or bought parts. Might have been expensive.

Kai: 11039 Innov8rz
I saw a super helpful mechanism which I want to try playing around with. It’s called a husky lens and it’s a AI training tool. The mechanism has a chip for training AI models and a small 2 inch IPS display so all the training can be done without a separate computer on the small display.