Competition Robot Design
The Port Hueneme and Ventura County regionals are getting closer and closer. This means that our mechanical sub-department is hard at work finishing the final robot design and getting ready for production. In this post we will take you through our design and show you the changes compared to our Alpha bot.
Drivetrain
For our drivetrain, there are a lot of small changes, but the overal design has remained relatively similar.
The electronics have been moved around a bit, the swerve modules have gotten protective covers over them to make sure wires and other parts don’t get stuck inside the gears and the bumpers now have plates on them to better guide the notes towards the intake. We also added our sponsor plates to this design.
Intake / Storage
The same can be said about our intake and storage system. It is all very similar to earlier designs, this does not mean we haven’t changed anything. We have mainly been looking into reducing weight and making everything more compact. A noticable change is the addition of two extra strips to be back to better guide notes from the storage into the shamper
Shamper
Our shamper has been an amazing part of our robot. As you might have seen on our youtube channel or in this thread. We have been able to shoot constently from a wide range of positions. This does not mean we haven’t made any improvements.
We made the whole system a lot more compact by changing the width of the system to the width of a single note. In our experience, this also increased the acuracy because the note would always hit the shooter wheels at the same position.
The ways of powering our feeder, shooter and amp wheels have also changed slightly. We added an extra motor to power our kicker wheel so that we could better control the note. We also did this to make sure our shooter motor did not overheat, as we have been experiencing this during testing. The final change to our shamper is the addition of a roller. This roller removes the deadspot we had in our system and creates an more reliable and effective system.
Climber
The climber has seen the biggest changes in the robot. As you could have read earlier in our buildthread, we have switched between designs. Our earlier design was based on team 4087’s rollable boat hook design. This design is ideal for compactness and height, but it had the problem of getting stuck when you unrolled it to quickly.
After we figured this out, we made a quick switch to an other design that our team has experimented with before. The design is really simple compact and robuust, but has the downside of not being able to reach to the highest point of the chain.
Future Steps
Starting yesterday, we will be busy with producing the new robot, with an increased focus on in-house production. As we get closer to physical upgrades, you will see them here first!
Written by:
@Matbet - Mechanical Design Lead
