Hello!
We are a community team from Clinton, NY, although we are looking to transition to a school team this year. We are honored to hold the team number of former team GearedUp, making this our 12th year competing.
This thread will detail our robot build journey, and a CAD design of the robot can be found at
We initially proposed two different robot designs among the team:
A robot design with a single intake/output arm that consisted of a set of horizontal slides which could rotate mounted on a set of vertical slides. The benefits of this design included it being easier to design and control, while the lack of a feed through style bot meant that it would take extra time on the field to turn around between pickup and drop off.
A robot design with separate input and output arms that would involve a handoff between two hands to move the sample from the front to the back of the bot. The benefits of this design included it being faster on the field once constructed due to its feed through style, while its disadvantages were more present in the pre-competition stage, with it being harder to design and program.
We then held a team vote, which saw design 2 winning with a narrow margin. Our robot designer took this design to tweak and improve to come up with this year’s robot.
One part of both designs that we ensured reached the final design was our reused baseplate and two-layer baseplate/top plate design. We spent a lot of time last year developing a baseplate and drivetrain that was compact, easy to drive, and allows for the use of the OpenOdometry mounts for the REV Through Bore Encoder. This is extremely useful for out team since we use a meccanum drivetrain. The nature of the wheels in this drivetrain means that the amount a motor rotates vs how far a robot goes cannot be calculated precisely. This would make motor encoders and unreliable source of distance, thus making independent distance measurement crucial for autonomous. More detail about that system can be found in later programming sections.
A new addition to that drivetrain this year was the top plate, which is mounted 50mm above the baseplate and provides a place to mount all of our electronics and control circuitry to below, and robot attachments above. This plate is also mounted on 3D printed hinges so that with the removal of just two easily accessible screws, the entire top half of the robot can open up, allowing easy access to control systems for cable management and rewiring.
While the robot was based off of robot design 2 (seen above), this design was only a concept and large parts of it needed to be tweaked or redesigned to make the robot practical.
One such part was our hand, which was redesigned to use 3D printed parts instead of off the shelf TEXTRIX channel and gears like the original design. This made the hand much cleaner overall and kept with our theme of making use of many 3D printed pieces on our robots. This hand will be used on both arms as it securely grasps the samples and is easily controlled.
Our team recently acquired a Prusa Mk4S, a huge upgrade from our previous old printer I honestly don’t remember the name of. We filmed a (admittedly not the best) time lapse video of our new printer printing our 5 part tape measure mount in 2.5hrs
Since I can’t add videos here, you can view the video here
