First Robotics Competition

So in about a month the first robotics competition will be held down at the volley ball stadium at the University of Hawaii and this is a picture of our team with this year's Iolani robotics FRC robot. The tricky thing about this competition is the surface on the ground. This white material is "regalif" or regular glass shower liner. This combined with a special plastic on the wheels give it a coefficent of static friction of .05 making it very hard to drive. The reason for static friction and not kenetic friction is mostly because a wheel uses static and not kenetic. The point on the wheel doesnt want to slip and so when it slips you move slower and dont speed up as fast as if you started slowly and moved faster. The shooter in the center is actually a baseball-ish pitching machine in the sense that the wheels spin really fast so when the plane of the wheels touch the orbit ball the orbit ball moves at the same speed as the plane of the wheel. This allows a fast efficient shooter and gives backspin allowing the ball to fall into the trailer rather than climbing out as would forward spin.

Its kind of late, but thanks for reading
Mark.