Kickoff:
Every year for kickoff, our team first gathers early in the morning to share our preseason successes and goals for build season. Then after watching the live stream, we gather back and break the entire team into groups to read the rules and form a strategy, then reconvene and discuss. We repeat this process once more after we have determined a strategy to come up with robot designs.
Strategy
Among our strategy groups, we started with dissecting the game manual to better understand the game as a whole. Each member of our groups was given a portion of the game manual to read, and then the members came back together and discussed the rules and asked questions about each section. After gaining a better understanding of the overall game, groups began creating an overall game strategy. Then, we came back together and presented our strategies to the rest of the team and debated which strategies were best eventually coming to a consensus that a rapid speaker note shooter was a high priority, we needed the ability to score the amp and trap, and favor ranking points and the idea of specializing in burst-fire shooting, while being able to play the entire game.
Robot Designs:
When we broke off to discuss robot designs, we used a diverse amount of resources, looking back on past years’ games and using KrayonCAD to develop some rudimentary designs, as shown below.
Our original idea was to attach a shooter to a pivoting telescope (pink arm), but we then contemplated the feasibility of shooting from a mechanism that could intake and outtake from the same opening, speaking that a flywheel would likely be needed to shoot long distances.
Our long process of picking through various designs included the idea of being able to “burst-fire” notes from the alliance zone to the speaker, hinting at a quick path from the ground to the shooter. We also wanted to keep a small robot for easy navigation, wanting to be able to move under the stage for quicker rotation. With so many different elements to this year’s game, we thought it would be best to minimize our freedoms of motion, combining subsystems to leave less room for error, while also maintaining that aspect of modularity.
We found several approaches, yet our most appealing idea so far involves a shooter mounted on top of an elevator, handed to by an indexer and over-the-bumper intake, giving a direct path from the not to the shooter. Inspired by user howlongismyname and his 12-hour robot design, we sought out the idea of putting a hook on the second stage of the elevator that would come back down to a locking mechanism, then continue extending upward, using the over-the-bumper intake as a guard, to score the trap. This design of course has a lot of calculations and fine-tuning, but we believe that by combining the subsystems, we can maximize the time and efficiency put into constructing/controlling our robot.
Other solutions we are currently looking into are using either the intake or a bar mounted on the shooter to score the amp, inspired by Cranberry Alarm’s Intake vs Shooter Testing. Again, there are many things to consider in terms of minimizing freedoms of motion, so we will continue to test the feasibility of each concept in a two-robot system.
The Apollo/Artemis System
Our two-robot system is a method we are trying out for the first time this year, in hopes of providing more time for programming/drive practice, also while allowing the opportunity to “fail fast” and pivot the design as needed. Below is a rough schedule of how we think this season will go.
Any feedback on strategy/robot design/scheduling would be greatly appreciated!