Meet the 2025 REV ION FRC Starter Bot for REEFSCAPE. The robot is designed to give teams a practical, adaptable platform for this year’s game. Built entirely with components from the REV ION ecosystem, the robot provides a foundation that can evolve with your team’s ideas throughout the season. At its core, this robot is about simplicity and adaptability. The design gives teams a head start with a reliable base that can be easily reconfigured as their strategy develops. From scoring coral to delivering algae, the Starter Bot provides the tools to compete effectively while leaving plenty of room for teams to innovate and make the robot their own.
Key Features
Drivetrain:
The swerve drivetrain has become the go-to basis for the majority of FRC teams. Swerve gives great maneuverability, allowing the robot to navigate the field in any direction. This makes tasks like aligning with the reef for coral scoring or repositioning in tight spaces easier. While we have chosen a swerve drive for the starter bot this year, we believe that flat tank drive can be effective this year since the majority of the scoring is on your side of the field and direct path cycles without defence will exist.
Manipulator and Scoring System:
Coral Handling: A single-stage elevator with an integrated wrist allows for efficient intake of coral from the human player station and scoring on levels one, two, and three of the reef. The design emphasizes simplicity over scoring on all levels. With a single stage elevator you can easily score on levels 1 to 3. Given the number of scoring locations for coral, we felt that the slightly lower max score was worth the trade off for simplicity. Teams who want to score on L4, can adjust the geometry of the wrist or add another stage to the elevator, both of which are changes that are accessible upgrades for this design.
Algae Intake: A floor intake mechanism mounted to the chassis was added so that teams can streamline the delivery of algae to the processor and contribute to cooperative scoring strategies. The intake subsystem is completely self-contained with both the deployment and intake motors both mounted to the intake itself so this can be left off or added later as teams want.
Endgame
The current robot design doesn’t include an endgame mechanism. We felt that while the endgame is an important factor in this game the majority of the scoring will be from coral and algae. While not tested, we believe that teams can design or add cage hooks to the elevator to facilitate shallow cage climbs, expanding their capabilities without overhauling the robot.
We hope that all teams can take something from this design and contribute to your own thinking about this game. There have been some amazing other releases of ri3d teams, and prototypes from the open alliance so far and we can’t wait to see where this FRC season takes us.
CAD for the robot is available now here, additional step by step build guides, code, and extra documentation will be available within the next week on our documentation site located here. 2025 REV ION FRC Starter Bot | FRC Kickoff Concepts
Good luck!
