One of our goals is certainly to develop a functional and competitive robot for whatever the 2022 FRC game may be in three short days, however, this is overshadowed by our goal to provide resources to the greater FRC community by doing so.
By doing so, our intent is raise the floor of FRC and to create a robot that is viable for teams to create that may not have as many resources as a well-established team or a university (the robot is planned to be made with nearly entirely hand power tools, a basic machine shop and standard FDM 3D printing) or the resources to do as intensive prototyping–hopefully we can help you jump ahead into a much more refined design right away and allow you to take these designs even farther!
While many of us have FRC experience and are still excited to build and compete with robots as we do through the numerous competitive robotics programs we have within MSOE Robotics , an even larger portion of our student organization is centered around promoting and inspiring robotics in the greater community. A significant portion of our team is involved with the MSOE FIRST Ambassador Program which is centered on supporting FIRST programs in the local Milwaukee area and are active mentors for FIRST teams and are volunteers at FIRST events and we are looking forward to being able to use Ri3D as an opportunity to not only continue supporting our local FRC teams, but also help the greater FIRST community. As such, our primary focus is on producing documentation and resources (I’m sure we’ll have a blast regardless).
We understand that the sooner we can get these resources into the community, the more helpful they can be as teams work to make decisions and hence the traditional three-day goal. We do also recognize the limitations of 72 hours are quite intense, and as such are working to prepare as much as we can, such as building the KOP drivetrain/basic control system in advance so that we can spend our full efforts on developing game-specific prototypes rather than just trying to build a robot in three days to show we can.
Also, since this is the first time we are participating in an FRC Ri3D, there may be some hurdles we have to overcome to make the release of this documentation as smooth as possible, so we ask for your patience as we work to get as much as we possibly can to you as quickly as we can. With that being said, please reach out to us on this thread or with the links to our various platforms in the initial post as we would love to answer any of your questions. We are in the process of setting up Q and A sessions for us to share what we are doing directly and immediately, allowing us to directly cater our work to what the community thinks is most beneficial.
After these three days, we do not plan on dropping off the face of the earth and would be happy to continue to provide more specific information or answer any other questions about the robot. The robot itself will reside in the MSOE STEM Center for local FRC teams to learn from and utilize as a resource—including a rookie FRC team housed within the center (FRC 8847).
