[MrForbes]

I wasn't at the meeting yesterday...I was at the Roadkill Zip Tie Drags in Tucson. That was fun!

But by Friday, we had a pretty good start on a gear/climb robot. We have a design for the climber mostly roughed in with CAD, and a first attempt at the gear handling thing half way done in plywood/lumber prototype (no CAD guys on that subteam). We have a rough idea of how big we expect the robot to be (small), and found the CAD models of the kit chassis but have not yet virtually cut them to the proper size. We also have a prototype chassis coming along nicely, using the leftover parts from the 2015 robot, including the electronics box with most of the electronics in it, as well as a pneumatics board, all plumbed.

So, we're about where I expected us to be.

The fun thing about fuel, is that we are doing our best to ignore it. Although the first experiment we did, involved driving the robot to the wall with all of our 12 fuel in the way. Looks like we kind of want to make the robot so it will do it's job with fuel on the floor, between the bumper and the side of the arena.