Quote:
Originally Posted by Karthik
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.
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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