FRC 3061 Huskie Robotics - 2025 Build Thread

[Lotem49]

Welp, it’s almost kickoff and Huskie Robotics is more ready than ever

I’m Lotem Harnik, the Robot Captain of Huskie Robotics, Team 3061.

Team Links

• Team Website
• YouTube Channel
• GitHub
• Instagram
• SPOT Scouting Platform
• 2025 Robot CAD - Onshape

About Huskie Robotics 3061

Last year was our first year as part of the Open Alliance, and we loved it so much that we’re back for this season. Huskie Robotics is a high school team from Naperville North High School in Naperville, Illinois. Founded in 2009, we’ve been building robots, cultivating passions for STEAM, and impacting our community for over 15 years.

Our team comprises over 100 members and 17 mentors, including students from two different schools within our district. We strive to demonstrate inclusion and foster a close-knit Huskie family.

Our Mission Statement

Huskie Robotics cultivates an environment emphasizing the importance of student leaders, ultimately investing in our members’ personal and professional growth. Through our work in STEM and robotics, we promote innovation, a sustained impact, and the fostering of community outreach on a local and global level. We strive to sustain a team that is an annual model for fellow teams to emulate while inspiring the future leaders & change-sparkers of STEM.

Team Objectives Summary

These objectives guide us and more fully help us break down the season.

1. Maintain and Build Relationships with the Community: Foster and expand community partnerships, encourage member outreach participation, and aim for measurable achievements such as the Impact Award.
2. Strengthen our Robotics Family: Build an inclusive, collaborative culture that empowers members through active participation and diverse leadership.
3. Prepare Team for the Future: Ensure sustainability by preserving team knowledge, training members, and engaging in off-season projects.
4. Become a World-Class Robotics Team: Compete at the highest levels, contribute to the FIRST community, and build a competitive and reliable robot.

Season Goals

Under each objective, we write goals to hone on specific things we want to achieve during the season.

OBJECTIVE: Maintain and Build Relationships with the Community

• 80% of the members of our team have at least 8 service hours and our entire team has a median of 11 hours by our first competition.
• Invite the district community, parents, mentors, and corporate partners to the annual Robotics Showcase a couple of weeks before our first regional.
• For every FLL/FTC team that we mentor, the assigned student mentor(s) fully participate in at least one meeting a week.
• Host a 28-team FLL qualifier at NNHS along with a tournament for elementary school teams.
• Send weekly summaries to all stakeholders during build/competition season.

OBJECTIVE: Strengthen our Robotics Family

• Host a team bonding event during a meeting and have the captains complete a KFT which notes the level of success.
• Make sure no one is sitting alone at team dinner who hasn’t specifically chosen to.
• Help every member find a subteam they enjoy.
• Model team values starting with the leadership team.
• Team value moment every week (like safety moment).
• Reevaluate the strength of our family every 3 weeks by a poll.

OBJECTIVE: Prepare Team for the Future

• Have every member certified in at least 50% of all subteam processes in one subteam.
• Explore at least one major project in each subteam during the off-season to further the knowledge and development of our team.
• Hold technical and leadership workshops.
• Have subteam standardization that can be navigated by a new member by the end of the next preseason.
• Retain 80% of members throughout the season.
• Fully complete 4 different FPM preseason projects to further team development each year.

OBJECTIVE: Become a World-Class Robotics Team

• Qualify for the 2025 World Championship.
• Win the 2025 Midwest Regional.
• Win the 2025 Northern Lights Regional.
• Have no major failures in qualification and finals matches.
• Win the Impact or Engineering Inspiration award at any competition.
• Post weekly Open Alliance updates throughout the season.
• Build a robot that meets our design requirements for each competition.

Goals for Open Alliance

As part of the Open Alliance, we will strive to share updates on our season as frequently as possible. We aim to portray not only our successes but, more importantly, our failures throughout the season.

Our hope is that this thread becomes a valuable resource for everyone in the FIRST community and provides a beneficial learning opportunity for us as a team. We also encourage you to ask questions and give feedback.

We wish all of y’all a great season!

More to come!

Thanks,
Lotem

[Lotem49]

~24 Hours In, and Reefscape is definitely something

We spent kickoff hard at work analyzing the game and starting to brainstorm. Our main objective yesterday was to investigate the game and set some initial priorities for the team in the form of design requirements. In parallel, we also assigned a specific aspect of the game to each of our feature project managers to start brainstorming and prototyping.

Initial draft of design requirements linked: Here

Here are our initial thoughts about the game (these are all just thoughts and may be completely wrong by next week):

• Lower speed than last year; fast acceleration is critical.
• The shortest cycle driving time is around 1.1 seconds from station to reef; fast mechanisms are critical so that you can cycle as quickly as possible.
• Definitely a “run into the feeder station” game, so having a fast and reliable coral human player is important.
• Collecting coral off the ground is not really worth it—it’s even less incentivized than 2023 cones because of the human player’s ability to load the robot in auto.
• Intaking coral from the source and scoring on opposite sides of the robot gives ~33% shorter cycles to the closest scoring location, making this hugely beneficial in auto.
• The April tags on the barge may not be so necessary for us because of their height and our ability to use multiple cameras.
• No real incentive in quals and early regionals to score algae high.
• Scoring algae in the processor is important early if we want any shot at the coral RP.
• The deep cage may be a trap—it’s only worth 6 points. Early in the season (like 2023), most cage RPs will likely come from penalties. Later in the season, we can somewhat assume teams will figure out the shallow climb.
• Scoring algae in the processor is also important as cooperation is the first tiebreaker for qualification ranking.

Our first post-kickoff meeting is Monday, so expect some prototypes from us in the coming days!

[Lotem49]

Are we missing something, because this is kind of promising - the vibes this week

What a wild week it has been, and we have probably had the single most productive week in Huskie Robotics history (nothing like a good Week 1 regional to get you going).

Robot archetype

Because of our Week 1 competition, simplicity in our design is our top priority. Looking at all the archetype ideas we came up with in the days following kickoff, none was simpler than a funnel, feeding from one side of the robot to the other, going into a vertical elevator that scores/shoots lightly the coral on the reef. With the scoring action only taking up 2 DoF, this achieves our goal. Our choice for this type of scoring device was solidified by Cranberry Alarm’s RI3D.

This design packages well with an algae intake and also gives a lot of room on the robot to package a climber. That being said, packaging a climber has been one of the hardest challenges of the week.

Drivetrain

This year, through choreo analysis, we found that within the SDS ecosystem, L2+ modules were the best balance of high acceleration, low top-speed sprints, and higher-speed sweeps around the reef. We’ve identified that our drivetrain is more important than ever.

This season, we will run all MK4n modules for packaging reasons:

Although this may look a little odd, it gives us the ability to package both a wide intake on one side and an elevator as close as possible to the outer rail on the other.

CAD is mostly done for the drivetrain, and we are manufacturing it next week.

Elevator

Wouldn’t it just be nice to have a copy of the 2023 Worlds-winning elevator? And wouldn’t it be great if it was already mostly CADed? Well, look no further. Alex has spent the last week hard at work putting together this elevator, heavily inspired by 4144 2023 elevator. It is a four-stage continuously rigged elevator run by two Krakens.

Why get the elevator done in Week 1 of the build season? Simple—because we are fairly confident that this exact elevator, or a variation on it, will be on the robot.

Funnel/Manipulator

So, turns out the funnel will be big, but not crazy. Early on, we identified the importance of quick acquisition of game pieces. Looking at some of the best game-piece-acquiring robots, we wanted to steer clear of an ultra-precise feeding solution and give our human player as much wiggle room as possible to just chuck the coral into the robot as hard as they can. We landed on a funnel design pretty early on and had multiple ideas for designs.

Horizontal roller

This funnel geometry utilizes horizontal rollers to have a controlled point of contact as early as possible on our funnel.

This design did not work as we intended. It jams too often because the wheels force the coral into a “corner” that it gets jammed in. This design also doesn’t take coral that is fed incorrectly (this is unlikely to happen, but better safe than sorry, right?), and we are actively trying to prototype a vertical roller geometry inspired by early 4451 funnel testing.

As for the manipulator, we elected to use 2.25" 40A AndyMark wheels spaced 1.5 inches apart and 4 inches inside-to-inside. We found that this configuration of wheels best took in, spit out, and held the coral.

Videos of funnels/Manipulator

1/11 funnel testing - Google Drive

Algae intake

For now, we are prioritizing a processor-scoring algae intake rather than mechanisms to score the algae directly in the barge. Through testing, we realized that a simple slap-down intake like we had in 2023 would do the trick. We have been prototyping compression values and plan to use our polycarbonate tube rollers that we developed in the preseason.

Videos of intake tests

Intake proto - Google Drive

Climber

As mentioned, the climber has mainly been a packaging issue. With the funnel, most of the vertical airspace above or close to our estimated center of mass is taken up by the funnel. Our design requirements state that we only need a shallow climb, but looking at RI3D deep climbs, some of the similar motifs could package well into our design.

Another important aspect of precision climbs is how fast you can align them, early in the week we prototyped a cage, an alignment jig that we call the cage catcher, and it centers and put the cage in a known position every time.

This motion overall will be actuated using a telescopic tube at an angle.

Now how to climb? We came up with the idea below by thinking about the two basic ways that we’ve seen climbs being done. We’ve seen teams push down on the cage and flip a cage, and if we could somehow flip the cage on our bumper while clipping into the cage, we would effectively be using the bottom of the top of the cage as our bar to climb on it.

We built a prototype with our cage catcher deploying out like an intake, and it worked great but had slight differences from our original mental physics.

How do we fit this all together?

You may have noticed that both our cage catcher and the intake take up the same space on our robot. We plan to make those coaxial on a max spline tube, with the cage catcher spring-deployed and locking in place going through our intake.

→ Point to intake down and up
Blue is cage catcher and retracted telescoping tube climber.

Hope Y’all swing into week 2 as smoothly as this mentor

[Skyehawk]

Stealing this mentor climb strat for the robot

[stefanilic]

Software Week 1 Update

I’m Stefan, software lead at Huskie Robotics. Just like the rest of our team, we had a productive first week of the season, and we’re ready for all that’s coming in the next few weeks!

Big Decisions

The first week of the year is when you make the most decisions, and that’s the same for us on the software team. We figured that, with the general proximity of the reef to the human player stations as well as the limits placed on defense, that quick acceleration would be king for drivetrains. Through analysis in choreo, we found that L2+ gearing would be best for this strategy.

Also, with the fast pace of this game, we are placing priority on our ability to align quickly at the reef and at the coral stations. This is heavily reliant on the placement of our cameras on the robot. To find this, we started the week out by testing extreme conditions (how close can we get to the AprilTags and still have a good view of the tag?, what is the largest angle we can point the camera away from the tag and still have a good view).

Based off of these extremes, the location of the AprilTags on the field, and the projected design of our robot, we decided on having four cameras on our robot, with the two front cameras mounted on the elevator, facing inwards at each other to get the best view of the tags at the reef, and the two back cameras mounted onto the swerves and facing outwards to get the best and widest view of the surrounding field while approaching the coral station and reef to score.

We have communicated a lot with our drive team in order to see what we’ll need to automate for them and what they will want to control themselves. Our main takeaways for now are that we will have a way to help with quick alignment at the reef, and that we will have a new touch-screen operator interface.

Our plan to help with alignment is first to see if our robot can accurately and consistently drive to the directed pose to score. If this isn’t possible, we will determine the location of the AprilTag bounding box for the cameras when we are perfectly aligned to each scoring location, and then use that to prompt the driver to go left, right, or stay straight. Our touch-screen operator interface will be a handheld extension of our driver station computer, and we plan to run Elastic on it with buttons for each scoring location on the reef.

Due Preparations

With feature designs not finalized, we can’t start coding quite yet. However, we have a general idea, and we’ve been researching and preparing based on that. Members have been researching past code, such as our 2023 cube intake and our 2024 climber, and seeing how they can be applied to this years’ subsystems. So far, we know we will have an algae intake, elevator, coral manipulator, algae remover, and climber. Our elevator will be controlled with Motion Magic Expo, and our manipulator will have a state machine for 2-3 sets of IR sensors. Soon, we’ll get finalized designs for subsystems, start coding, and test in simulation to be prepared for when they come our way later in the season.

We have also been working with our new practice bot, specifically characterizing the swerves to maximize precision, which is something we will have to do with our new drivetrain in a few weeks’ time. This week, we will test with new experimental SysId routines to tune our PID and Feedforward values on the drive and steer motors.

What’s Next

Weeks 2 and 3 of the build season are my favorite, because they are my self-proclaimed “whiteboarding weeks.” Feature designs will come rolling in, and we’ll be hard at work on the logic and intricacies of it all.

[DebabandyaDash]

Huskie Robotics, Team 3061 is excited to announce the fourth release of our open-source scouting app – SPOT (Scouting Platforms On Time)! SPOT is an open-source, modular scouting app platform upon which a team can deploy a scouting app with little to no prior experience. SPOT is designed to be a long-term solution for scouting: easily configurable between years, simple to maintain, and new features added each year.

This is the first release for the 2025 REEFSCAPE season, which includes updated config files for match scouting and team/match analysis. We plan to refine the match scouting interface and team/match analysis visualizations based on internal testing and feedback from other teams throughout the season. As always, you can fork SPOT and adapt the config files to suit the needs of your team. Details about SPOT are available on our website . There is a quick start guide and a set of video tutorials to get you up and running quickly whether for deployment for an event or to evaluate locally.

SPOT is designed for a wide range of teams with a wide range of expertise and requirements:

• A team that is new to scouting and isn’t sure what information to gather or how to analyze their data. SPOT comes as a preconfigured app that can be deployed with minimal setup and will provide all the basic functionality needed by most teams.
• A team that has some experience with scouting and wants to collect specific data that may not be part of the default configuration but that doesn’t have significant programming experience. SPOT can be configured by modifying configuration files rather than by writing code.
• A team that has experience with scouting and wants to perform custom analysis operations or advanced custom scouting interfaces and has some programming experience. SPOT can utilize user-provided analysis modules to extend its functionality beyond the default configuration without requiring teams to modify the base code.
• A team that has significant experience with scouting and significant programming expertise. SPOT is open source, documented, and designed to be extensible such that teams can start from this code base and build their own custom scouting system.

Key Features:

• An easy-to-use platform for data entry throughout matches.
• Works on all platforms, from iOS to Android to the web.
• Analysis page to display detailed statistics and charts about matches and teams.
• Admin view for live scouter management at competition.
• Preconfigured for the 2025 REEFSCAPE game with no additional game-specific customization required.
• Easy deployment experience when teams run a server on Glitch
• Optimized for teams who have internet access while scouting, completely functional for teams with no internet access.
• Quick setup with a built-in first-run wizard to walk teams through configuring their scouting app, connecting to The Blue Alliance, and setting up their database.
• Completely configurable analysis and scouting view without the need for a single line of code.

This season also marks the implementation of an important new feature: Offline Scouting. If there is no connection at an event, or if a scouter’s device disconnects mid-match, SPOT will present them with a QR code upon pressing submit match. The admin can then scan this QR code to receive the scouter’s data and upload it for analysis. This will be explained in greater detail in a video in a video tutorial that will go up soon after this post.

Please refer to this scouter training slide deck for instructions on this year’s match scouting view.

If you have further questions or would like to request new additions to SPOT, feel free to ask here or email us at [email protected]!

Listed below are some screenshots of SPOT:

As always, comments and questions are encouraged!