Better late than never: Team 1188, The Ravens from Royal Oak, MI are proud to present our 2023 robot, Eclipse. FRC 1188 Royal Oak Ravens 2023 Robot Reveal - YouTube
Eclipse features swerve drive, a belt-driven telescoping arm, and a pneumatic pinchyclaw.
A lot of teams built this same archetype of robot. What makes Eclipse unique is the control scheme. Instead of having high-medium-low setpoints, the operator uses a touchscreen monitor running a custom network tables webapp to specify exactly which node they want to score on. Whenever the driver holds the left trigger on the controller, the robot automatically drives to the correct location on the field. The drive coach simply calls out a node, e.g. “F3”.
Mechanism actuation is handled autonomously based on the robot’s goal and location on the field, which is tracked with Limelights, AprilTags, and PoseEstimators. For example, whenever the robot has a game piece and enters the community (but not while on the charge station), the mechanisms will fire and extend the arm to the proper setpoint for that node. Likewise the arm will go to the proper substation setpoint as soon as the robot enters the loading zone. These can be overridden if auto-actuation would cause a problem.
Was this more competitive than just finishing way earlier and getting tons of driver practice? Absolutely not. But we knew that going in - during our initial strategy sessions we decided that, based on our resources, our best shot of winning events would be to ignore the high goal entirely, finish a hybrid/middle goal robot in a few weeks, get a ton of practice, seed very high, and pick a high goal scorer. But our team is very young this year - we have no seniors, and more than half of the team is in eighth grade. So we decided to stretch ourselves on engineering to improve ourselves for future years.
I’d like to extend a VERY special thank you to team 818, The Steel Armadillos. Not only did they lend us critical spare parts both at our events and between them while our school was closed, but they let us set up shop in their work area for a whole week between events. Without this time we would not have been able to finish the robot. Their full field is incredible and shown in the picture above. Congratulations on your amazing run to the MSC finals and deep into Einstein; you earned it and it was a joy to watch. @Ryguy7824 @NolanV
I know many people will see we only won one playoff match all year and simply move on, and that’s fair, but we do think we have something fairly unique here that we plan to build on in 2024 with more of a focus on actually winning. So if anyone does have any questions feel free to reach out as the students do enjoy talking about it 
Regards,
-czb