On Sunday our team split up into 3 separate groups, and each group is developing a design for this year's challenge. The teams will then present on Friday to our local community The people in attendance range from parents of team members, district faculty and administration, to members of from our local NAVY base. We also have a number of engineers, and representatives for our various sponsors who will attend.
The teams have now made some progress and tomorrow will start hammering out the difficult aspects such as specific dimensions of various parts of the robot.
The teams started out with a list of potential objectives that they wanted the robot to accomplish, and are working out the ways in which they might design the robot to complete those tasks.
Currently it looks like one of the groups is focused on shooting in the high goal of the tower and attacking a few specialized defenses. The second group is looking at being more of a breaker bot/assist bot focusing on all of the defenses and having the ability to carry balls to either be scored in the low goal or handed off to an alliance partner. The final team is focused on a couple of defense, would like the ability to shoot for the high goal, (though mainly focused on scoring in the low goal, and climbing the tower.
I think most of the teams have settled on the rhino tank drive, and our team ordered all of the parts necessary to make them ourselves, but as a back up plan the teams are strongly considering using pneumatic wheels of which we have 8 currently in stock. There is some concern about getting stuck on some of the defenses with wheels, but I personally am confident that the teams can get past this.
Here is a link to a google folder with right ups on each team's progress.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?...&usp=sha ring
Best of luck to all!
Edoga