Inspired by practice field photos, I’ve started to wonder how many teams have access to good practice fields and build practice robots.
We’ve got a “multi-purpose” room that is large, but we can not store any carpet or field elements nearby. It can be somewhat useful for some driver practice. The nearest carpeted field that we can use is over an hour away and we can’t split our team due to school supervision issues.
How is your team outfitted for practice?
-Mr. Van
Coach Robodox
The TechnoKats have a permanent full-size field, built basically as the prototype for the low-cost FRC Wooden Field. Every few years we manage to take home the carpet from a regional or offseason event, so it’s in pretty good shape. We strive to build all the game-specific components each year.
It gets disassembled and transported to Indianapolis every summer to serve as the practice field at the Indiana Robotics Invitational.
We have a 2/3 field (full length but not full width). It is in the basement of the NVH lab at Chrysler, so it’s a fairly long walk and the robot has to go through an elevator to get there.
The ceiling is fairly low, with lights around the edge, so we had to put the rack in a fairly specific place to avoid hitting the lights when scoring high. Lucky for us, the lights are on chains, so if we hit them they don’t break.
We also have another rack upstairs for testing, but that is an indoor concrete road so the wheels slip much more easily than they do on carpet.
The REC (Rochester Engineering Centre) has a room dedicated for the practice field but it’s only wide enough to be half width but full length.
http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f327/X-Cats/2011%20Season/Week%204/IMG_0023.jpg
Ed, your new digs are sweet!
1551 has about a quarter-field’s worth of carpet, and it’s been folded many, many times. One of my dream scenarios involves getting a permanent field setup somewhere in the local area… The main problem being that the local area consists of trees, fields, and grapes!
The room is a bit chilly and smells of mothballs.
Other than that it’s cool.
We are setting up a full field on our school gym starting tonight which will be available to Rochester, NY area teams (anyone within driving distance) on Sunday starting at 10 am. There will be lots of practice time as well as opportunities to test robots in timed matches. I don’t know how quickly we will need to take down the field since there is no school on Monday.
Team 2851 has a full sized wooden field for teams to use on Feb 19 at 2:00pm.
email [email protected] or [email protected] for more info
In past years we’ve just build the field specific stuff. There year however we have a full room just for robotics. Half is our machine shop and now we have a half field with gates and all.
At the moment we only have the scoring peg arangement and the feeder station but we are working on a half size field to pratice on.