Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregor
Your last 3 robots have been extremely ambitious, unique, and well done. Why are your robots so different, what are you doing that's different than other teams? During brainstorming when someone proposes something like your 2015 robot everyone would throw it out immediately. How do encourage such unique thinking, and when you move into the design process how do you know you'll be able to pull off your crazy robots?
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That's a hard one to answer, kind of like trying to provide a recipe for innovation...
One of the things that makes 971 unique is that we are willing and able to move significant mechanical complexity into software. 2014 and 2015 were good examples of this. 2016 wasn't as crazy from a software point of view, but we also have gotten good at making robots work. We have strong software mentors and students with experience in controls and automation along with strong mechanical mentors and students to build designs good enough to be accurately controlled. The mechanical bits make the software easy (or at least possible).
We tend to start with a list of requirements for the robot, quickly decide what we know is going to work from previous years (and actually start designing it in parallel), and then sketch out concept sketches of the rest. We do a lot of big picture design with blocky mechanisms and sketches to work out geometry and the big questions. We then start sorting out all the big unknowns in that design, and working our way from there to a final solution. I think that a lot of what makes us different is that we impose interesting constraints on our robots, and then work really hard to satisfy them. We come up with most of our most out of the box ideas while trying to figure out how to make the concept sketch have the CG, range of motion, tuck positions, and speeds that we want before we get to the detailed design.
In 2014, we wanted to build something inspired by 1114 in 2008. We put requirements on that to be able to quickly intake the ball and also be able to drive around with the claw inside our frame perimeter ready to grab the ball. We tend to get to the requirements pretty quickly, and then start figuring out the best way to achieve them. After a bunch of challenging packaging questions, someone proposed that rather than using a piston to open and close the claw, we could just individually drive the two claws with motors. That brakethrough let us make our packaging requirements work much easier, and ended up being a pretty unique design. That got us comfortable building robots with more and more software.
In 2015, we were pretty confident that we didn't need to cut into the frame perimeter. Unfortunately, by the time we had determined that that requirement was hurting us, we had already shipped the drive base. We spent a lot of time working through various alternatives to figure out how to stack on top of the drive base and then place the stack. In the end, the only way we could make it work was what you saw. We knew that we were very close on weight, and again used software to allow us to remove the mechanical coupling between the left and right sides to reduce weight. We were confident from our 2014 experience that we could make that work. I like to tell people that our 2015 robot was very good execution of the wrong strategy... We wouldn't build it again, so maybe you guys are all smarter than us there
2016 fell together much easier than I expected. It had more iteration than we've ever done before (lots of V2 on mechanisms), which helps it look polished. Honestly, most of the hard work in 2016 was in the implementation, not the concept. We wanted a shooter that shot from high up, and the way to do that was to put it on an arm.
We are getting to the point where we have a lot of knowledge built up around what fails in these robots and what to pay attention to. That part has just taken a lot of time and a lot of hard work. We don't spend much time debating where to do low backlash gearboxes, or figuring out how to control or sense various joints. Sometimes, I think we design the robots we design because we over-think problems and then come up with solutions to them. We work through a lot of math for gearbox calculations, power usage, etc, and do some basic simulations on some of the more critical subsystems. We also do a gut check to make sure that we think the subsystems will work when we build them, and we have good enough prototypes to prove out anything we are uncertain about.