Kickoff Day
Team 303 started kickoff day by figuring out the game and analyzing what each part of the field did. We filled out Team 2791’s Kickoff worksheet (a common theme that we will be adopting this season, we want to adapt resources compiled by other teams where we can, putting our own 303 spin where we can).
The kickoff worksheet did a good job of starting to get us to think about strategy with open-ended questions.
An example group filling out the worksheet.
In the offseason, Team 303 compiled a list of overarching robot goals in order of importance.
Lehigh is the FMA District Championships.
Also, in the offseason, we created a schedule for build season with important deadlines, it will get refined as we get closer to them. Our competitions are pretty late into the competition season, in Week 4 (Warren Hills) and Week 5 (Centennial).
January 5th
Team 303 started off the day with a 1678-inspired game manual test to ensure all members were up-to-date with the various rules of Reefscape.
“Steal from the best, invent the rest” - 1678 Golden Rule #3
The team then brainstormed game objectives, breaking off into groups to rank objectives by Difficulty, Auto Benefit, and Teleop Benefit before being. Using a simple cost-benefit analysis (cost-benefit is calculated as auto benefit+teleop benefit-2*difficult), we determined a preliminary look at what seemed to be the highest value to do.
Some trends: we noticed that coral scoring seemed to be higher value than algae scoring, climbing seemed to be not as valuable as in previous years, and defense seems to be relatively dead (as a team that has resorted to defense the past few years, this motivates us to try to get a scoring subsystem working).
We then started a discussion about whether we wanted to focus on coral and algae, since if worst comes to worst we want to focus on one gamepiece. We compiled a pros and cons list:
No decisions were made, we want more information before coming to a decision.
January 6th
We created our Needs/Wants/Do Not Plan on Doing list today. Each category is ordered from top to bottom by importance.
We want to keep things simple to give us the best chance at getting a scoring robot by our first competition, which we’ve had struggles with in the past. We decided that L1 coral scoring would be the easiest scoring objective to do, and so we have that as our only scoring objective in the Needs category. If we have an L1-only robot that works, we will be happy. However, we think our robot can use the same mechanism to score in all levels. We will design our robot such that even if the lifting mechanism for our robot doesn’t work to score in L2-L4, we can still score in L1 with a static manipulator.
Despite other teams saying that packaging this season will be hard, we believe that certain attributes of our drivebase will allow us to have more space than some teams (to be explained in a future post). We believe we will have enough space to fit an algae removal+processor mechanism, but this is strictly conditional on whether we have the time and we have no qualms about cutting it from the final robot.
January 7th-8th
Team 303 focused on building the reef at our workshop. The reef is about half a day away from completion, putting us ahead of schedule (yay!).
We have been paying attention to RI3D and OA teams, creating daily update presentations to update new members about what other teams have been doing.
Example slide from OA Update presentation
Cranberry Alarm’s de-algae mechanism struck us as intriguing because of its ability to do processor+dealgae all at once while being relatively small, so we created a prototype and it does in fact work. One thing to note: the drills running the wheels are a bit underpowered and thus the mechanism has less grip than it will on the final robot.
That’s all for now, please let us know if any of you have feedback for us and we’ll be back soon.
