Summer Project Poll

[Joe_Widen]

I've heard a lot of people talking about summer projects, so I thought I'd make a poll for it.


I'm trying to persuade my team to work on some mecanum wheels and a crab drive. I think I got the mecanum across, but while I was looking at Mecanum, I found that crab drive is so much cooler!! We're also going to hopefully attend IRI.

So what are you planning on doing?

[Adam Richards]

Originally Posted by Joe_Widen

So what are you planning on doing?

My team doesn't know it yet, but I'm going to get them to help with starting up another local team for the purpose of collaboration.

[Michelle Celio]

I do believe it was last year that our team set up a "summer camp" for middle schoolers. It was based around Lego mindstorms and from what I hear they did some amazing things. I do believe that we are trying to do that again this year, we're just having some administrative difficulties. Also, we plan to be doing allot of fund raising since we're nearly broke.

[Nuttyman54]

There needs to be an "other" option. We're making a crate that can fold-out to be pit shelving, as well as possibly attempting some different shifting transmissions.

[Hiteak]

Hopefull during the summer we will make a cart and try to improve the team overall (website, advertizing, fundraising, ect).

[Bill_Hancoc]

We would really like to work on a mencanum drive but anything that has to do with the chassis to speed up next years design process would be great. We do plan to attend IRI

[Nita]

Our programming team will be messing around with the camera (which they STILL haven't figured out yet), the design team will be messing around with this program we might be getting to replace our old ones, the website team working on the layout, and I forget the rest.

[Koko Ed]

Trying to make a bigger, better Rah Cha Cha Ruckus (oh and update our photoalbum all the way back to '92 and make a new recruitment video and maybe help 1591 and 1930 make theirs).

[Billfred]

1293 is going to be spending a fair amount of summer working on the fundamentals--getting the team organized, beefing up some of our weaker areas, and hopefully learning a few technologies we haven't meddled with. I (personally) also hope to keep working on the cheap kiwi drive project I'm working on here at USC.

[Gabe]

Our team wants change our entire robot construction for next year. No more 1/2" machined aluminum plate for the chassis (our team uses up 1/2" stock really fast!), but instead want a lighter welded frame. We also want to move away from 4-wheel, and try 6-wheel, or maybe treads. We are thinking about 2-speed shifting transmissions instead of the KOP transmissions, but that depends on the other two. Right now I'm looking at DeWalt 3-speed shifters with interest.

[Jay TenBrink]

We have had some interesting off season projects in the past. Many of our projects were dreamed up during Nationals or on our way back home from Nationals.

Summer of 2002: We had seen some cool shipping crates that converted into workshops down at the Epcot center. We designed and built our own and have been very happy with it. Stop by in Atlanta and check it out.

Fall of 2002: Our 2002 drive train was slow and weak. We resolved to never have that happen again. In the airport on our way back from Florida we formulated plans to build our robot dynamometer to test and develop drive trains.

Fall of 2003: We designed and built our robot CVT, (continuously variable transmission).

Fall of 2004: We built a 12 foot wide 4 foot deep floor to ceiling display case to show off our robots, trophies, and projects at our school.

Fall of 2005: On the plane back from Nationals in Atlanta the first sketches for our prosthetic robot hand were made. We built it in the fall and visited our regional medical center’s prosthetics lab as a team. Stop by in Atlanta and check it out.

Fall of 2006: We may continue to develop the prosthetic hand to give it individually powered digits or install pressure sensors on the fingers. We also may give it skin over its bones and muscles to make it look less cyborg and more human.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Building a CARDBOARD BOAT... again. Hehe. Also possibly building a mecanum drive and/or crab drive for purposes of testing and driver practice. Some fundraising. More programming projects with the Robovation robot.

[Mr. Freeman]

I might try to make a (motorised) robot cart over the summer.

Team 1552 is planning on making "stalker bot". The plan is to equip it with the camera that we never got working to track different color T-shirts. It'll be almost completely autonomous (didn't see a software option in the poll) and will be able to avoid collisions with ultrasonic sensors. We might actually decide to actuate some of the ultrasonic sensors to get a better reading of what is in front of the bot at different angles.

[CrazyCarl461]

Sensors

Our team seems to build nice mechanisms and then outfit them with crummy sensors. This year our crab drive had to be locked into tank mode for Buckeye due to rotary encoder malfunction (all is well now). This summer we are going to develop some nice robust and lightweight sensor assemblies for all sorts of great sensing - because a good design is no good if the RC can't figure out what the heck is going on.

[Donut]

We will be doing some robot improvements/testing, including designing a new drive system (heavily looking at a half-track), and doing lots of sensor testing (if we get all the sensors working and developed I want to we could be looking at using 13-20 sensors next year).

Our biggest project is team support and organization though. We are going to have to plan out next year's schedule and start fundraising immensely in the summer, and we are also going to have to convince teachers willing to do things in the summer to stay interested and stay involved as major teacher sponsors (we have an unfortunate trend of being able to keep a "head" teacher who helps run much of the club for no more than 2 years, and this year is no exception as our current teacher sponsor will be leaving our school at the end of this year).