[Jon Jack]

Kinsuk,

It's just a 10 point climber, but it should be pretty fast.

Glenn,
A lot of the kids had gone home for the day when we took the video, so I had to jump in as feeder. Not bad considering we had a washed up Einstein driver, a first time human player and a kid who barely knew how to operate?

I love hearing about how a robot came to be, I guess we'll let everyone in on the origin of the design...

The day of kick-off we came to the conclusion that:

1) a good auto mode could win most of our matches (at the regional level) before anyone touched the sticks.

2) floor loading was a requirement for a few reasons. First off, you needed to floor load to pick up more discs. Secondly, partners would inevitably miss shots and we being able to pick up their missed shots would cut down our cycle times and increase our throughput. Lastly, we noticed that it was very hard to shoot the colored discs in the pyramid or throw them from the loading station. We wanted to be able to take our opponents colored discs out of the game and reduce the number of possible points they could score in the pyramid goal.

3) A level 1 climb was required, however we felt we could mitigate the effects of a level 2 and 3 climb by being a strong disc scorer.

With this in mind we figured we were looking at a fairly complex robot. With lots of single purpose mechanisms. After our team meeting Kiet and I went down the street to a restaurant to discuss the game further. When we arrived, he came up to me and said "You know what we need? We need a 67 arm!". He was referring to 67's utility arm from 2012. At first I thought he was joking and then after a few minutes of talking about it, we realized it wasn't that bad of an idea. When we sat down we talked about how the arm could be used to pick up discs, tilt the shooter, hang, etc. Suddenly our list of mechanisms went from 8 or 9 to 5. Over the next few days we started working on individual parts of the arm (floor loader/funnel, magazine/feeder, shooter, etc). About mid way through week 2 all of these prototypes had been integrated together and worked pretty well together, so this design was given the green light.