6421 - 1/11/23
Mid-Week 1 OA Update
I would like to start this update by shouting-out the Mukwonago BEARs, team 930, for hosting and inviting our team to their kickoff event this past Saturday. After the revealing of the game animation and an event-wide rules review, the teams then broke off into separate rooms for their own respective discussions. Our team discussed this season’s game, robot roles, and we finished our discussion by setting our robot goals for this season.
The first thing we discussed were the actions a robot may do in this year’s game. As shown below, we defined both positive and negative actions. Positive actions mean that a certain action would aid our robot in scoring or make it more difficult for the opposing alliance to score, and negative actions meaning the opposite.
The next thing our team defined was robot archetypes. The main reason we decided to define robot archetypes is because of this season’s complexity. In the 2022 season, Rapid React, almost all the top robots were completing both aspects(climbing and shooting) of the challenge; individual robot roles were not very prevalent. As we looked back at this season’s game animation, our team believes that there will be a larger presence of robots with individual roles within the top alliances, rather than alliances made up of two to three robots that can complete every task. With that in mind, our team defined the eight different possible robot archetypes that are shown below.
Finally, our team discussed our robot goals for this season. Our robot goals for the season can be seen in the photo below. For the chassis, we decided to go with Swerve due to its mobility and the rather open layout of this year’s field. We are aiming to have the ability to pick up both the cubes and cones regardless of position and orientation. For scoring, we are aiming to score on all three positions with our priority being scoring on the Top level of the Grid.
At the end of our Saturday meeting, we assigned our pre-determined groups of students into their respective subsystem teams. Our subsystem teams are as follows: Intake, Handling, and Charge Station. As our team does not meet on Sundays, our students spent time before our Monday meeting doing research into different mechanisms. With 31 different mechanisms researched among the three subsystems, we came into our Monday meeting ready to discuss the first steps towards building our robot. The subsystem teams broke out into our available work spaces and started to review, discuss, and analyze the different mechanisms that were researched. By end of our Monday meeting, all subsystem teams had narrowed down their discussions and started to conceptualize two to three mechanisms.
Our teams spent Tuesday doing further research and discussion, along with building some concept prototypes. By the end of our Tuesday meeting, here is what each team had completed:
- Intake - The Intake team built two different concept prototypes. One that proved the applicability of a clamping end effector. The second was similar to the first prototype, but with free-spinning wood blocks as clamps. This was to prove a self-righting concept for picking up the cones. Heading into our next meeting, the Intake team will be working on a concept prototype focusing on a pinching/claw-like end effector.
- Handling - The Handling team started a concept prototype for an elevator with an arm attached. The main reason for this prototype is to get final dimensions to our chassis team. Heading into our next meeting, the Handling team will continue developing their prototype with hopes of finishing their first prototype, then adding functionality to it. With the end goal of testing by the end of the meeting.
- Charge Station/Chassis - The Charge Station team built the four Swerve pods we will be using on this year’s robot. Heading into our next meeting, the Charge Station team will start prototyping/designing the chassis with hopes to test the chassis before the end of the meeting.