Hi all. We both went through the competitions this weekend, so John and I thought this question will be appropiate for this week’s question of the week… And here it is…
Question 03/09/03: Now that you’ve seen week one, what changes do you wish you could make/are making to your robot and your strategy?
Again, great thanks to John for supplying this week’s question. Feel free to PM me any suggestions.
Have fun!
-Ken Leung
After St. Louis we realized there are quite a few changes to the robot that need to be done and I’m quite surprised that none of them are mechanical. After having a dead robot round after round we realized there are many things that need to be looked at and changed in the elctronics and programming of the robot. Hopefully have we go through and look at these items and then change them on Thursday at Pittsburgh the TechnoKat robot will be up and running 100%.
We are working to make the controls easier to use (the reason we didn’t release our stack of 5 on saturday morning). We may also be trying out different traction materials.
After totally scrapping our stacker because of it being useless, catching the side of the ramp in autonomy, and tipping us, we decided to put two arms that will just attach to the former base of the stacker and swing in and out so that we can still go under the bar. We are also going to work out some dead reckoning modes that we didnt have finished at Sacramento.
Cory
After having to remove our stacker due to weight, we were forced to do nothing but push bins. So, we spent day 1 focusing on this strategy, and eventually found out that it worked much better than our stacker. After what happened this weekend, I’ll say this. Make sure you can move bins WELL.