I always love how simple yet effective your robots are year in and year out. Can’t wait to see your robot in action in person this season at Rhode Island!
I noticed between your reveal pictures and the practice video you’ve replaced the back set of pneumatic wheels with a set of omnis, did you happen to encounter turning issues with a full pneumatic wheel layout on the kit chassis?
Excellent to have vision tracking. Was the vision tracking active (and guiding the robot) for alignment in this practice match? If so, for which tasks? Just loading station hatch panels? Hatch panel deliveries to the rocket? Cargo deliveries to the rocket?
I should mention that at GSD last week, we were asked by referees to disable our green LED ring light when not actively using it for targeting. We had not yet been using the vision-tracking to guide the robot, so we just turned it off completely. However, you’ll likely need to turn the LED ring light on when you’re using it, and off when you’re not. Ways to do that are either to put it on a spike relay or from a PCM output, if you have pneumatics on the robot.
That’s one awesome looking climber! Well done! I dare say it wasn’t as easy to get it to work as it looks from the finished product…
I’m going to be 100% honest in that I think that’s one of the best reveal videos I’ve seen all season. No edits, just a full practice match – sandstorm, a full rocket, and a HAB Level 3 climb – all in the time of one match. Pretty much the most impressive reveal video I’ve seen.
Incredible robot! Congratulations and best wishes at your first event!
We on 1519 are looking forward to seeing you at Pine Tree after that!
Thank you so much for your kind words Ken! Also, congratulations on your win at Granite State! We were all very impressed with your team and I’m sure you’ll only get better as the season goes on.
That’s unfortunate that the refs made you disable the LED ring light when not actively targeting. We’ve always had our LED ring lights constantly on during matches in the past and have never had an issue. This must be something new they’re enforcing. We do however already have a spike relay mounted to control our LED strips on the side of our robot. It would be pretty simple to hook up the ring LED light to that as well, but we’d prefer not to unless we were asked to.
We use vision tracking for the loading station, cargo ship and hatch panels for rocket. It’s not quite tuned for the cargo side of the rocket yet, but we’re finding that’s not really necessary. Scoring cargo is more forgiving than hatch panels on the rocket.
Haha, our climber may have gone through a few iterations before we got it to work that efficiently.
We’ve always left our LED lights on in the past as well. The rule has been around for a few years. This year, the rule is R9, with some guidance in the blue box with the rule:
“High intensity light sources used on the ROBOT (e.g. super bright LED sources
marketed as ‘military grade’ or ‘self-defense’) may only be illuminated for a brief time
while targeting and may need to be shrouded to prevent any exposure to
participants. Complaints about the use of such light sources will be followed by reinspection and possible disablement of the device”
We just use the standard old “kit of parts” ring light, which definitely isn’t “military grade” or “self-defense” brightness. A few years ago (I don’t remember exactly which game it was in) I do remember inspectors asking us to have the ring lights switch between on and off depending upon whether or not we were targeting.
I’ve always preferred to just have the light on all the time – it helps the drivers understand the robot orientation, prevents driver overload in needing to have yet another button to invoke the “targeting” function, and allows the image processing to start immediately when needed, instead of needing to wait for the half-second or so delay for the light to be on and have illuminated frames progressing through the processing pipeline.
I’m with you on that. By the way, I wasn’t complaining about your light; just trying to give you a heads-up about it so that if inspectors ask you to switch it on/off, you’ll be ready for it, rather than having to scramble at the last minute to pass inspection.
Congratulations on getting the vision tracking functioning - we still need to work on that! The cargo is definitely more forgiving to place than the hatch panels.
It’s amazing how much work it usually takes to get to “simple” for a mechanism! In order to progress a design to an elegant, simple mechanism, so much more work is required! Well done!
We also use the KOP ring light and I agree that it definitely doesn’t qualify as military grade haha.
I’m worried that if they ask us to only use the ring light while targeting, they might not like that we still have it on for most of the match. We use targeting to retrieve game pieces and to place them. It would only be the travel time of 2-3 seconds in between that it wouldn’t be on. We would also want to activate it a second or so before we needed it so the camera could recalibrate to the new brightness for the tracking to work.
Maybe we’ll try and make a shield around it so that we can keep it on and out of people’s eyes.
In order to progress a design to an elegant, simple mechanism, so much more work is required! Well done!