Team 6421 WarriorBots is proud to formally present our 2022 Robot: Goose!
We have had a very successful season so far winning both Wisconsin and Seven Rivers Regionals, as the Captain of the 3rd and 1st Pick of the 2nd, respectively, as well as winning the Autonomous Award at Finger Lakes Regional. We are the first team to win both events in Wisconsin in a single season, and we are super excited for our first Champs appearance on Carver with such a competitive group of teams!
Quick Feature Overview:
- 6 wheel KOP Drivetrain #TankDriveGang
- Linear Servo Adjustable Hood, Greyt turreted, vision assisted Shooter
- 6328 inspired “4” bar intake
- Flat Belt driven ball path with sensors to detect ball color and count
- “Spectrum” Style Climber, 10s floor to traversal with adjustable final height
- Multiple autonomous routines including 2, 4 and 5 ball autos
- Capable of accurately scoring from launch pad to fender
- Automatic rejection of wrong colored balls
Intake and Ball Path:
Our current intake is heavily inspired by that of 6328, a 4 bar design where the upper 2 bars are surgical tubing instead of some rigid member. This allows our intake to bend and contort like crazy but not break. We’ve been seriously loving this design, I know our driver especially appreciates being able to be less dainty about approaching walls or field elements. The one major addition that we added to help this design were 2 rubbery hard stops on the drive train which helps dampen the force of the intake deploying so it can grab cargo faster, and they ensure it doesn’t flop too low and smack cargo away from us. Also shout out to @pfreivald for giving some great suggestions on how to fix our intake after FLR. Our ball path uses poly flat belting and is lined with 2 photoelectric switches and 1 REV color sensor. The color sensor is situated right before our feeder wheels to detect cargo color and skew the shot path for incorrect cargo so they miss. The other 2 alert our drivers how many cargo we’re carrying, which is especially helpful to detect if we have accidentally ingested an extra cargo and need to get rid of it. There are RGB LED’s around the robot which signal all kinds of useful information to the drive team, such as cargo count, turret limits, ect. 2 Feeder wheels at the top of ball path prevent from entering the turret without the need for sensor assist on that front.
Shooter:
The biggest thing we ensured with our shooter was that cargo would be brought in straight and consistently into the flywheel hood, which we attribute to the level of accuracy we’ve achieved without needing a second roller. The turret itself helps us as a tank drive handle being defended on, with a Limelight to aid in aiming. Wiring is handled with a simple mesh cable wrap to keep everything contained and smooth as it swings around in our frame, and whenever the turret reaches a limit of motion it automatically swings around quickly and locks back on to the goal.
Climber:
Our climber was initially inspired by 3572’s 2013 climber, designed to feature a set of extending arms bringing bars into a set of locking hooks. A huge thank you to 3847 Spectrum and 95 Grasshoppers for their extremely detailed Open Alliances, some of the biggest hurdles faced in our design process we were able to find solutions to thanks to these teams.
At its core, our climber features 2 Falcon 500’s attached to ropes on the extending arms, the arms are raised up using a set of pistons, and the elbow is straightened with some surgical tubing that enables the arms to reach the bars. Falcons spool the ropes in, bringing the bar into the robot where a set of pistoned hooks lock on to the bar with their geometry transferring the weight off the arms. We initially tried to do this action passively, but ran into issues with successfully transferring our weight and due to time constraints we ended up making it actuated. Another big change was that at Finger Lakes Regional, we were controlling how far our arms extended/retracted by counting encoder ticks on the Falcons. Due to rope stretch and general strain on the system, that method did not stay consistent throughout the event. Now we are using encoder ticks for how much to spool out the rope, but now we bring those arms in until a set of magnetic limit switches trigger in the elbow, automatically firing the locking hooks (the entire climbing sequence only requires 3 button presses from our copilot). This part of our robot went through the longest design cycle and the most changes, but the specific geometry of our locking hooks inspired the robot’s name Goose (and definitely not Top Gun’s Goose, given the context that would be a bit unfortunate)
Thank you all, and see you later this week on Carver!