6421 WarriorBots 2025 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[scubadiv3r]

Welcome to the 2025 WarriorBots Build Season Thread!

Github
Onshape
Photo and Video Documentation
Team Website

New Build Space and Practice Area!

Right before the school year began, we moved into a new team workspace. This room is larger and comes with a separate storage closet as well for us to use. We’re still settling into it a bit, between planning TWIST and early season recruiting it has been a challenge to get everything up and running, but it seems like we have all our essentials in working order. Additionally, our school was able to help us secure 3x Bambu Carbon X1C printers and a new metal saw which have been working hard all pre season. Over Christmas break, we got the green light to set up our field carpet courtesy of Wisconsin Regional 2024 that we will be able to keep out all season (you can still see some of the field elements in the swerve drive scuffs).

Off Season Competition Recap

This off season, we competed in 5 off season competitions (Laser Lights, MROC, R2OC, TWIST, and Roboteer Rumble). Overall, we were able to win 2 awards and give new team members experience in the drive team and pit crew. Thank you so much to all the amazing host teams, we had such a blast competing!

Toys For Tots

This year we were able to print and donate 2148 Toys to our local Toys for Tots organizations as well as to the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots and Tanvir-E-Niswan, an all-female educational institute in Hyderabad, India. Included with the toys was a multilingual card explaining how the toys were made.

TWIST

We are very excited to also be sharing some updates for the TWIST program here on our build thread as we get everything ready for 2025. TWIST is a massive undertaking for us, and we have been so incredibly appreciative of the support and love we’ve seen for it from teams and the FIRST community. This year we were extremely excited to add the Student Opportunity Fair this year, featuring 11 schools. scholarship providers, and military groups. As a bit of a teaser, we anticipate that registration for TWIST Robotics Competition will be opening around the early weeks of competition season, teams who have competed previously will get notified a bit in advance.

STEM Forward - Education Stemmy Award Winners!

We were so thrilled to be nominated and selected for the Education Stemmy Award at STEM Forward’s 21st Annual sySTEMnow, southeastern Wisconsin’s preeminent STEM education and talent development conference, we brought together business, education, and the community to share inspiration and best practices.

FLL 2024 Wraps Up

This year our team members directly ran two FLL teams out of our space this Fall, and for the first time BOTH of our teams made it to Sectionals! Our older kids team Goblin Sharks took home the second place Robot Design Award, and our younger kids team AlphaBots took home first place in Robot Design Award! We are so incredibly proud of these kids (and speaking as a mentor, our high school students who put so much time into mentoring them) and we look forward to having them on WarriorBots FRC soon.

WarriorWATCH 2025

Once again we are running our WarriorWATCH public scouting system this season with a fabulous group of supporting teams. Looking forward to posting a dedicated update on this later in season, alongside the list of supported events for this year.

Looking forward to Kickoff in just a few short days!

[scubadiv3r]

Kickoff Weekend!

This was our first year running an internal Kickoff day in a while, but it’s been nice to have more room to spread out in our buildings new STEM wing where our field will be in season.

Most of Saturday was just digging into the rules and getting a basic understanding of how this game works. A bunch of our awesome parents and mentors put together a little mock field for students to scoot around on which was fun to watch.

Students were acting out the various robot archetypes we anticipate seeing this year. I’d made a joke during this segment of kickoff about how the robots that can do everything are ‘everything bagel’ robots, and eventually a robot more along our goals ended up being called a ‘sesame bagel’ robot. What exactly gets cut is a discussion for a later MSCW list.

‘We can do anything, just not everything’

One thing that we did right before kickoff was our Design Team (a group of 5 of our most experienced students) settled on our team goals for the year. In general, WarriorBots strives to be a well rounded team, working to be competitive in both the robot and in the attribute sides of the competition. The one big tweak for this season is that we are not picking a robot award target at the beginning of this season. With the new point system, it makes sense to wait a bit to see what direction this robot is heading in to select what award we’re the strongest contender in. 5 points is 5 points

Fun thing we figured out in field build is that our team flags fit within a reef segment, our leading team spirit student is very excited to have a ‘wizard staff’ to wave around this year in the stands, apologies in advance to the folks seated behind them.

[Navin]

Having fun with deep climbing!
Cage weight:16.4lbs
All other included hardware: 2.77lbs

[scubadiv3r]

MSCW Priority List

On Monday the whole team sat down to discuss priorities for this season. Generally speaking the students decided to focus on being a fast coral cycling robot with a deep climb. This list is not locked in stone, we are re-evaluating this on Saturday, but it gives us some direction for the rest of the week to help guide the first version of prototypes.

The build team has split up into 3 groups, focusing on the End Effector, the Elevator, and the Climber. This week each group has been prototyping to determine if we set the proper priorities and we still think that our initial goals are feasible for us. Hoping to have a ballpark idea of what this robot is going to look like and get some detailed requirements started on Saturday.

We’ll have some more mechanism specific updates posted by our student leads once we get a bit further on prototypes.

(P.S. We just got the TWIST 2025 date confirmed with our school district last night, massive thank you to my fellow mentor Dan for getting that locked down, we’ll have a formal announcement out when we have the promotional materials ready )

[Aidan6421]

Camera Calibration
TL:DR:

• We Use PhotonVision Cameras to see Apriltags.
• Vision allows for better performance in matches, and consistency.
• Techniques and goals for camera calibration.

Calibration
We’ve spent the better part of this week theorizing and working on calibrating 6 cameras for our robot (3 for spare). For calibration, we printed out the calibration sheet, taped it flat onto a clipboard for best results, we also taped our camera down to prevent movement. At the beginning of calibration, we spent lots of time trying to get all different angles and positions to okay results, however we discovered that it is not so much the quality of the snapshot, as opposed to the number of them, the spread, and the angles.

Through our data we found that

• The more weird twists and angles you can incorporate the better, the cameras will better detect these up close, so try and save some snapshots for that
• Ideally, we would get good calibration with around 65-80 snapshots, and an error less than 1 pixel, we had best success with setting the
• Light is very important, we personally used the M18™ ROCKET™ LED Tower Light for this, at varying distances, try to minimize outside lights as this can affect speed & quality of calibration.

Learning From the Past
In past years, we tried to use a large board to calibrate, however, moving this was very annoying and clunky, we found that a standard size calibration sheet was much quicker, but also easier.

Calibration of cameras.

Why Cameras?
Cameras do a number of things…

• Get a consistent pose throughout a match, free from wheel slip and collision issues, allowing alignment to field elements.
• Cameras allow us to turn to an angle, for example, this year you could turn yourself to the reef, processor, or tags on the barge.
  • These in conjunction will later be used by us to align from any position to a face on the reef for consistent scoring on L4.

[Faarhan]

Intake V1 and V2 prototypes

During the 1st week of prototyping we manufactured and tested 2 different ideas for what will eventually become our intake for coral.

V1
The first version of our intake was the end effector on the REV ION robot. We built this first to give us a tested starting point to change and improve on.

V2
We began building V2 to test out how we would center the coral while intaking from the coral station. During our testing we successfully ran the intake, but doing so made the entire intake explode. The plates of the intake were accidently made of acrylic instead of polycarbonate so when the coral hit the hardstop it shattered the plates. With V3 we hope to further test similar ideas as V2 with a few changes made based on the observations we made before the intake was destroyed.

[cmaupin]

A good learning for teams here. When you have access to “free” polycarbonate left over from COVID, please make sure to check that it is polycarbonate as a lot of people don’t understand the difference and were worried about separating coughs, not the structural strength of the product. The best way to tell is to look at the edge of the material. Acrylic will be clear, polycarbonate will be blue or have a darker edge.