Greetings, and Happy New Year! Kickoff was just last Saturday, and we’re already off to the races. After meeting and watching the kickoff live from our workspace, we began to generate some ideas for our robot. We’re very excited to share what we’ve got so far – this build season is looking like a lot of fun!
We have attached a video of the game reveal here for you to watch if you would like. Sponsored by Haas, the game this year involves two main activities: the Charge Station and the Community Grid. The Charge Station is a platform with hinges connecting it to the ground, allowing it to pivot from one side to the other (it naturally rests parallel with the ground). A team can score points during Autonomous or Teleoperative Phase (the Teleoperative phase is the part of the match when we can remotely control the robot) by resting robots on top of it, with bonus points if the charging station is level. For the community grid, each team must create “links” of cargo by lining three pieces in a row. There are two different pieces of cargo: the cube and the cone. In the first two rows, there are specific places for cubes and cones, while on the bottom row, there are “hybrid” cells which can hold either type of cargo. We are still in the early phases of design, but we are excited to share more as we progress.
The Business Team: While we may not be designing the robot, we have our own work that we are thrilled to be able to get to work on. Starting off slow, the Business Team is creating outlines for the Woodie Flowers and FIRST Impact Award essays. From here, the team plans on delegating certain chunks of each essay to various team members to break up the work. Outside of the essays, work on the Digital Animation Award is going swimmingly, and we hope to be able to start the editing process on that in the coming days!
The Programming Team: Even though they don’t have a robot to mess with just yet, the Programming Team is still hard at work ensuring that they are prepared when the time comes. Currently, they are investigating the movement aspect of the Autonomous period, and how they could change the code from a time based system to a distance based system. With this, the team is researching the wheels we decided to use, those being tank wheels. Tank drive is fairly different from the Mecanum wheels we used prior, and the Programming Team is researching to better understand its capabilities. They are also looking into the Limelight sensor further, as well as a camera detection system. As a part of the game field, there are stickers attached to the community grid called April Tags, which robots can use, similar to how Limelight uses reflective tape.
The Build Team: Build is currently the head honcho of the team, hitting the ground running on designs for the robot. On kickoff day, the team gathered to discuss ideas for the robot, and today those ideas are being put into prototype format. Part of the team is designing a claw that can grab cargo with two prongs, which we hope will be able to grab both types of cargo. Another group is working on a secondary grabbing mechanism as a backup idea, while a third team is chipping away at an arm design that could utilize either grabber and efficiently pick up and drop cargo. Finally, our build captain, Liam, is looking into potentially using a pneumatic system for our claw, which would give us a stronger grip and more torque than if we used a motor or linear actuator.
That just about does it for today’s recap. With the build season being officially started, we should have much more consistent blog posts for you, so keep an eye out. Farewell, and best wishes from the whole team!
