Spinning Kicker In RoboCupJunior Soccer Open

This is the story of how we tried to adapt a spinning solenoid into our RoboCupJunior soccer robot in 2018 ⁠— and why it didnt work. Background We were amazed by the spinning solenoid featured in the 2017 robot showcase video from the Japanese SSL team, OP-AmP. Thus, we decided to adapt their idea into one of our RoboCupJunior soccer robots as a side project of sorts, to be built concurrently with our main robot, in the 2018/2019 period. In the end, this robot was never fully constructed since there were other more pressing problems with it such as having insufficient space and being too heavy. Nonetheless, at least we had explored the spinning solenoid concept thoroughly enough to know it isn’t really “worth it“ for RCJ soccer, especially since we are allowed to have double dribblers, which is a much more efficient method for increasing the robot’s shooting agility. Also, I would have added more videos of the actual robot itself running but we didn’t really have a habit of documentation in the past so ther