FRC125 - The NUTRONs- 2016 Reveal

[Brandon Holley]

Hey CD!

Team 125, the NUTRONs, are proud to present our 19th robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition - Escape Velocity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmdYwfFlmF0&feature=youtu.be).

http://i.imgur.com/ni0EZJL.jpg

Escape Velocity features:


24"x22" Overall Drivebase - fits on a single 'Rampart' and two total 'CDF' planks
14.5 ft/s Single Speed
6WD, 6" Pneumatic Wheels
Defeater of A, B, D Defenses
Helical Intake Roller
Pneumatically-actuated Catapult - capable of scoring from the Batter to Outerworks


We'll see everyone at:
Arizona North Regional
NEFIRST Rhode Island District Event
NEFIRST Boston District Event
NEFIRST Pine Tree District Event

-Brando

[Dylan179]

Awesome

[Kevin Leonard]

This robot is going to have 4 events before district championships in a rough game like Stronghold. It looks fantastic, though, and I love that you made it thin enough to fit on on rampart. I wanted to do that, but felt it didn't leave enough space for intake in our design. I'm glad you made it work though!
Good luck this season!

[mwmac]

Very nice! Looking forward to seeing it this weekend in Flagstaff...

[carpedav000]

Love this robot! Good job 125 :D

Quick question though... What happens when you are getting ready to shoot and another robot bumps you? Does the boulder fall out/become misaligned?

[NShep98]

That's more like it. That will be exciting to see in Boston.


please pick us

[jwfoss]

Love this robot! Good job 125 :D

Quick question though... What happens when you are getting ready to shoot and another robot bumps you? Does the boulder fall out/become misaligned?

The opponent causes a penalty and 125 gets points (since they shoot touching the defenses).

Excellent concept and execution on a unique design this year guys, very impressed.

[bkahl]

Quick question though... What happens when you are getting ready to shoot and another robot bumps you? Does the boulder fall out/become misaligned?

The opponent causes a penalty and 125 gets points (since they shoot touching the defenses).

Beyond what Justin said, the shooting process has been refined since the filming of the video. The release of the intake roller into the firing process is a much faster transition.

EDIT: We also have firing positions from the outer works and batter. Those provide a more protected firing position.

[Josh Goodman]

What happens when you are getting ready to shoot and another robot bumps you? Does the boulder fall out/become misaligned?

I looks like teams will have a very small window of time to do so. Based on the trajectory of that shot and lining up with the intake on the back, you can bet they'll be shooting from _just_ outside the outerworks. Which will probably be a little too close for comfort for most teams.

Cool robot concept and great design. I look forward to watching your matches!

EDIT: Wow -- I was really late on this response. Justin and Bailey beat me.

[carpedav000]

Beyond what Justin said, the shooting process has been refined since the filming of the video. The release of the intake roller into the firing process is a much faster transition.

EDIT: We also have firing positions from the outer works and batter. Those provide a more protected firing position.

Oh, cool :p I was just curious. :D

[Andrew Schreiber]

This robot is going to have 4 events before district championships in a rough game like Stronghold. It looks fantastic, though, and I love that you made it thin enough to fit on on rampart. I wanted to do that, but felt it didn't leave enough space for intake in our design. I'm glad you made it work though!
Good luck this season!

We've been doing 4 events pre DCMP for a few years now.

When Brando told me size of bot I nearly fell over laughing thinking it was a joke. Then I got sad cuz I had to fit electronics in. But it happened.

Not mentioned is the code. Our software team has been hard at work and there's some fun surprises in store for folks.

[Brandon Holley]

This robot is going to have 4 events before district championships in a rough game like Stronghold. It looks fantastic, though, and I love that you made it thin enough to fit on on rampart. I wanted to do that, but felt it didn't leave enough space for intake in our design. I'm glad you made it work though!
Good luck this season!

Definitely an important design consideration, and something we're definitely used to dealing with as we've done 4 events before DCMP the past 2 seasons (as Schreiber pointed out).

We focused a ton on making our defense crossings happen, but making them as least violent as possible. Going over half of a rampart, and being able to fit inside the moat make for some smooth transitions. We're hoping the pain of designing to this small size will pay super long dividends as the year goes on.

-Brando

[mrnoble]

Fantastic work. Now I know what we are up against in AZ North, and I'm scared

[Alex Cormier]

Whats the trick with the corners of the bumpers. How do you maintain the pool noodle so well?

[Karthik]

Definitely an important design consideration, and something we're definitely used to dealing with as we've done 4 events before DCMP the past 2 seasons (as Schreiber pointed out).


I'd love to learn more about what considerations you've made over the past few years to help your robots withstand the rigors of 5 regular season competitions. With more and more regions going to districts and the increasing cries to end the 6 week build, I think more teams are going to have to start designing specifically for extra run time on their robots.

[Michael 4499]

Definitely an important design consideration, and something we're definitely used to dealing with as we've done 4 events before DCMP the past 2 seasons (as Schreiber pointed out).

We focused a ton on making our defense crossings happen, but making them as least violent as possible. Going over half of a rampart, and being able to fit inside the moat make for some smooth transitions. We're hoping the pain of designing to this small size will pay super long dividends as the year goes on.

-Brando

With the small frame and high CG when the arm is up do you guys have any problems with tipping over? This is an awesome robot see you guys Thursday!

[engunneer]

I'd love to learn more about what considerations you've made over the past few years to help your robots withstand the rigors of 5 regular season competitions. With more and more regions going to districts and the increasing cries to end the 6 week build, I think more teams are going to have to start designing specifically for extra run time on their robots.

And how much of a ship of Theseus is it at the end of 5-6 events?

[Andrew Schreiber]

With the small frame and high CG when the arm is up do you guys have any problems with tipping over? This is an awesome robot see you guys Thursday!

The arm really only goes up to shoot. There's a travel position for crossing barriers that's much lower.


Re Theseus comment:

As far as I know Dark Matter ('14) still has most of it's original structure in place. The CIMs got replaced. There was a mid season gearing change, most of the belts got changed. Intake wheels were replaced but that was due to damage, same as the Digital Sidecar, pneumatics regulator... Now, I've never seen a frame bowed quite as much as it is. And it makes some horrid noises while being wheeled around likely due to cracked bearing races in the drive pods. But, not bad for playing offense in the heavy hitting NE defense. As you know Branden, we took a lot of big hits that year.

[MARS_James]

So is there a reason you went with a spotlight for a photon canon instead of a focused flashlight?

[IronicDeadBird]

Wow this is actually the first unblockable robot I've seen.

[Andrew Schreiber]

So is there a reason you went with a spotlight for a photon canon instead of a focused flashlight?

The lights are one of the things we've been tinkering with. The LED strip we had on in this video is what we had sitting around the lab from who knows what. We had a few high intensity LED's on order and have since hooked them up.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Looks great, good luck in Arizona!

[Brandon Holley]

So is there a reason you went with a spotlight for a photon canon instead of a focused flashlight?

What you see in the video is all auto aiming w/ an IP camera, so we just needed to create light for retro tape. We had the LED strips in the lab, so on they went. We've refined a bit to blind less people since this was filmed on bag day.

Photon cannon is on there for backup of course...

EDIT: Schreiber beat me to it.

-Brando

[waialua359]

I dont get it.
You didnt even share the most impressive attribute of this robot.
The fact that it fits in a VEX size container as a check in luggage to compete in Arizona.:)
Post that Twitter pic!

Good luck this season.

-Glenn

[marshall]

We've been doing 4 events pre DCMP for a few years now.

When Brando told me size of bot I nearly fell over laughing thinking it was a joke. Then I got sad cuz I had to fit electronics in. But it happened.

Not mentioned is the code. Our software team has been hard at work and there's some fun surprises in store for folks.

Andrew, can you describe your process for cramming the electronics in? Is it based in CAD or do you use cardboard or just do it free style once the rest of the robot is built? It's something we've struggled with in the last few years and I'd like to know how a team like 125 goes about it.

Thanks!

[Andrew Schreiber]

I dont get it.
You didnt even share the most impressive attribute of this robot.
The fact that it fits in a VEX size container as a check in luggage to compete in Arizona.:)
Post that Twitter pic!

Good luck this season.

-Glenn

https://twitter.com/nutrons/status/706998824296947712 Ok, to be fair, it's 2 vex sized boxes.

Andrew, can you describe your process for cramming the electronics in? Is it based in CAD or do you use cardboard or just do it free style once the rest of the robot is built? It's something we've struggled with in the last few years and I'd like to know how a team like 125 goes about it.

Thanks!

Well, we're not GREAT at it. It got done. But we had a dedicated area for electronics and just played with it (in various forms) until we knew how it'd fit. Then cut panel, put it all on, and done.

The robot is small, but because the ball never enters the perimeter we actually had a nice space to put everything.

[Brandon Holley]

Andrew, can you describe your process for cramming the electronics in? Is it based in CAD or do you use cardboard or just do it free style once the rest of the robot is built? It's something we've struggled with in the last few years and I'd like to know how a team like 125 goes about it.

Thanks!

When we started laying out drive concepts and overall robot concepts, the idea of a really tiny robot was in the back of our minds the whole time. We knew from the get go that electronics, pneumatics (there are 4 big black clippard tanks on that guy, and a compressor), battery placement, etc were all going to be challenging.

Once the first pass mechanical design got to a point we had some semblance of confidence around, we created an MCO (mechanical control outline) for the electronics. Essentially this is a volume of space, in a specific place on the robot that we agreed to not use for robot mechanicals, and allow the electronics group to stuff their pieces into.

I think this first pass MCO was something like 8"X13"X6". The electronics team laid out all their parts on cardboard, and then quickly progressed to a polycarb proto board. Around this time we had completed the frame of the robot and were able to do a sanity check around sizing and positioning. We constrained the electronics to an exceptional degree to allow us to move the battery around to optimize CG placement for defense crossing. A 13lb battery in a 78lb robot has a HUGE effect on CG and therefore how smoothly we can traverse.

From there, the electronics team started making it real and attaching it all together. We made some improvements along the way like isolating the entire board on some closed cell rubber foam (to help with impact) and tightening the wiring up to a crisp state that makes it reasonably serviceable.

We're definitely not experts, but the process based around building an MCO (with confidence) is the key element I'd offer as advice.

-Brando

[marshall]

When we started laying out drive concepts and overall robot concepts, the idea of a really tiny robot was in the back of our minds the whole time. We knew from the get go that electronics, pneumatics (there are 4 big black clippard tanks on that guy, and a compressor, battery placement, etc were all going to be challenging.

Once the first pass mechanical design got to a point we had some semblance of confidence around, we created an MCO (mechanical control outline) for the electronics. Essentially this is a volume of space, in a specific place on the robot that we agreed to not use for robot mechanicals, and allow the electronics group to stuff their space into.

I think this first pass MCO was something like 8"X13"X6". The electronics team laid out all their parts on cardboard, and then quickly progressed to a polycarb proto board. Around this time we had completed the frame of the robot and were able to do a sanity check around sizing and positioning. We constrained the electronics to an exceptional degree to allow us to move the battery around to optimize CG placement for defense crossing. A 13lb battery in a 78lb robot has a HUGE effect on CG and therefore how smoothly we can traverse.

From there, the electronics team started making it real and attaching it all together. We made some improvements along the way like isolating the entire board on some closed cell rubber foam (to help with impact) and tightening the wiring up to a crisp state that makes it reasonably serviceable.

We're definitely not experts, but the process based around building an MCO (with confidence) is the key element I'd offer as advice.

-Brando

I REALLY appreciate this info. Thank you!

[Brandon Holley]

I'd love to learn more about what considerations you've made over the past few years to help your robots withstand the rigors of 5 regular season competitions. With more and more regions going to districts and the increasing cries to end the 6 week build, I think more teams are going to have to start designing specifically for extra run time on their robots.

The NUTRONs were one of the strongest voices for Districts in New England. While the change was likely inevitable, our team pushed very hard to educate the New England masses as to the advantages of the District system. In 2014, when the transition finally came to fruition, we wanted to really show what a team could do. We decided to attend 4 District Events in New England before DCMP, playing 71 matches before we even got to BU for DCMP.

When we went to Districts, and when we had 4 events in District, we also made the decision to scale back our practice bot efforts. There's numerous reasons for this, but among the top were resource savings as we machine/manufacture 100% of the pieces of each of our robots. We duplicated our shooter mechanism, but in general, the need for a practice robot started to fade away as we had 4 unbag windows to utilize. The reason I mention this is because the competition robot not only had all of those matches on it, but also ALL of our practice time.

As we all know, 2014 was a brutal year on robots, particularly ones that 'ramp camped' in the corner and shot into the high goal. We knew building a robot that would last an entire season through that number of plays would require some pretty targeted design strategy. That strategy has evolved now over 3 build seasons of building for 'hyper-plays', and is something we're getting fairly good at. What is below is not something necessarily game changing or unique to the NUTRONs, many teams take similar approaches, however this approach has worked well and produced robots that have lasted (and performed at high levels late into Saturday afternoon at WCMP).

The strategy in its simplest form is boiled down to two design types:

Build for replaceability
Build it 'beefatronic'


#1 is pretty obvious - By making a part/assembly easily replaceable and having backups of said part/assembly at the ready, you have set yourself up to succeed when the part eventually fails.

#2 is the NUTRONs vernacular for 'overbuilding' something. Beefatronic includes going to thick sections of aluminum/polycarbonate/steel, welding specific items together, overpowering a mechanism (775pros, alleluiah!). Basically it means ensuring that this particular part/assembly WON'T fail.


So thats fine and dandy, but how do you differentiate between what type of component is a #1 or a #2? Well this is where the process becomes a hybrid form of art/science. We use our collective experience on the team to discuss specific mechanisms or scenarios. When we don't have a direct experience, we'll reach out or lean on other teams previous designs. The real difference maker though is beating the utter snot out of our competition robot.

While every team's focus is to 'finish early' we take that especially to heart. We give ourselves ample amounts of time with our competition robot to run it through its paces. We try to avoid damaging it for stupid reasons, but we definitely try to damage it through normal 'wear and tear'. This constant abuse starts shaking out big time issues. We'll see shafts twist, bolts shear, plates bend or plastic snap and see a pretty obvious issue that needs addressing via item #1 or item #2. We take advantage of the local week 0 scrimmages in the area and ensure the robot is ready to roll on a real field. When all is said and done, if we fail on the field, we want it to be for something that doesnt make you face palm right away - thats really the ultimate goal for any team I think.


As I said above, there is no game changing criteria in here. It's just having a design philosophy and overall process that shakes out bugs and then having some solid methods to address them. I absolutely love playing as much as we do, as does the rest of the team. Are we tired at the end of the competition season? Hell yes. But the intensity, competition level and experience we get from it is something I've yet to find in any other walk of life.

-Brando

[PayneTrain]

The strategy in its simplest form is boiled down to two design types:

Build for replaceability
Build it 'beefatronic'



No one asked for my input on this but I feel inclined to throw it out there anyway.

The traditional event structure definitely wore us out over the last few years. The idea of throwing as much as you can on the robot and figuring it out later obviously never worked for us except in 2013 and 2014 where we pushed the withholding system to its absolute limits and, especially in 2014, delivered a robot at Championships that was quite literally 100%+ different from the one we put in the bag.

This year in a never-ending quest to show everyone how insane we are, we signed up for three district events for no good reason (and don't tell anyone on 422 this but I was also eyeing either the Week 1 or Week 5 NC district). This opened up the opportunity to expand upon lessons learned in 2014 that were then obviously and succinctly discarded for 2015. We ended up running what can be the FRC equivalent of Agile Project Management, where we have a deliverable on a major system every single week of the season. We had a robot that we could have taken to our first event and won by the end of our first build cycle (Week 3... we lost a week to snow). We had a better version of that two weeks later and turned the first one into our development robot. Getting a base for practice and competition done this early was a first for us and a victory for the agile way we wanted to approach the season because it allowed our drive team, programming team, and fabrication to figure out what to expect in March and April.

Now we are using our unbag time to the fullest extent possible by the rules. We plan to work on building a third chassis over our next 3-5 unbag windows since it is a rather simple design that has undergone trivial iterations, the work can be done in parallel to our unbag work, and since it is only worked on during open bag, does not count toward our withholding allowance. Our closed bag shop time is being used to iterate on the more specialized subsystems.

I hope this all pans out because I have had a lot of fun this year running this kind of system and we finally got student engagement up to a level that we like.

TL;DR we know that by playing anywhere between 60-80 matches before we get an invite to St Louis that we will have to build an entirely different robot over the next 9 weeks, so we're doing just that. It's good to know that we are somewhat close to that.

Your robot is the robot we wanted to build (tiny) but we couldn't really get it a way everyone would be comfortable under the constant iteration of everything. I hope it does well because it's pretty dope.

[IronicDeadBird]

Fantastic work. Now I know what we are up against in AZ North, and I'm scared

Remember that time with the I told you so?

[apache8080]

Nice robot as always and great job at all of your events this year. Are you guys going to release your CAD for this year? When is your teams website going to be up?

Thanks for the code on GitHub it was very useful.

[Camilo86]

I'm currently rewriting the website. It should be up in a week.