Kickoff and Week 1:
Hey everyone, here comes the first official OA post of the 2024 season! Our first week has been full of dissecting the game, planning, and creating some prototypes for our robot. Without further ado, let’s get into the nitty gritty of what we’ve been working on this week.
Kickoff thoughts:
After watching the game animation, every member of the team went through the game manual, trying to get a good understanding of the game this year. Some interesting rule changes we identified (as many are probably aware of by now) were that bumpers had to be continuous, and the extension limit was a foot outside of the robot perimeter. In addition to this, we noticed that the notes were actually quite squishy.
After the rules were read, we grouped up and started spitballing strategy and robot ideas. Some very important elements of strategy were uncovered by this, such as:
- Being able to hang and score trap consistently would be good to focus on in endgame, as it would make gaining the Ensemble ranking point much easier
- Being able to score in Amp during Auton would mean coopertition can be started much faster
On the robot ideas side of things, we had a myriad of intake, outtake, and climber ideas such as:
Intake:
Some groups entertained the idea of a floor intake which could be lowered down to the floor, while others suggested having the intake be the same as the outtake, and have that piece be able to collect from the floor and/or source
Outtake:
Most groups suggested the idea of a wheeled shooter outtake with horizontal wheels, and have some way to angle that shooter downward to be able to score amp and speaker. However, some groups also entertained the idea of a clay pigeon shooter style outtake, as well as a punch/gantry style outtake.
Climbers:
Most groups suggested a vertical slide/pulley style of climber with two contact points, and an important point brought up by some groups was that the climbers would need to be able to pull the robot up all the way to the chain to provide optimum space for scoring trap.
At our next meeting after kickoff, we dove right into…
Prototyping:
The prototypes that were focused on this week were scattered around the board. For outtakes, a small team worked on creating a shooter outtake with horizontally oriented wheels. At the end of the week, this prototype was shooting a distance of about 10-12 feet. The wheels on this prototype were situated on both sides of the note, and had a total compression of 4 inches, 2 inches on each side.
Outtake prototype doing what it does best
On the opposite side of things, another group began putting together some floor intake prototypes. Using varied amounts of vertical compression, they determined that 1 inch compression would not work well, but 5/8ths of an inch seemed to work quite well.
1 inch compression working well…?
And not so well.
In addition to this, some header work began on climbers, meaning our bot was really coming together. Finally, we had another group build up the kitbot for this year so the driveteam could begin driving ASAP.
What’s coming up:
Prototype, iterate, redesign!