Hey everyone! This is Samson from AC Robotics bringing you an announcement thread for the AC Robotics RI3D 2024. We’ll be posting our updates, discussions, Q&A here.
We’re the official alumni group for the province of Alberta up here in Canada! We last did ri3d in 2018, 2019, and 2020 if you rememeber us, but we’re back and roaring to come back in 2023.
In 2020 we primarily had a team consisting of Alumni and Industry professionals but we have more in store this year…!
Our region has been especially struggling with maintaining FRC due to the lack of teams after the pandemic. Thus, the alumni group has taken the initaitive to start up a new rookie team 9449 the Yellowjackets from a bunch of our community members who have done FTC. As such you’ll also be seeing the debut of the 9449 in our RI3D event! (shameless plug haha). We’d love to have you join us for our journey as we share our ri3d journey and we hope that we can inspire other rookie team.
Thank you to our sponsor AndyMark for generously providing us parts for this RI3D 2024 build.
Also wanted to note that while we won’t be live streaming the build, a lot of resources and effort are being poured into production so that we can release some (hopefully) well-edited, high-quality, educational content, each day.
First and foremost, wow, what an incredible season this is going to be, massive shoutout to everyone at FIRST who made this season possible.
As for the game and some build info, here are some key takeaways we’ve made so far.
Kitbot: For our 3-day build, we explored a variety of ways to interact with the note. We’ll go more in-depth into some of these ideas in our video which will hopefully be posted tonight, but eventually, we came to the following conclusion. The kitbot does a phenomenal job at the most basic and essential part of this game which is taking a note and shooting it into the speaker. While we’re certain some other solutions would be able to do this just as well or even better, we figured that due to how accessible it is for teams, and how effective and reliable it is at its main objective, much of our 3-day build revolves around kit bot. There are of course however some downfalls of kit bot.
By default, kit bot cannot score notes into the amp.
Kitbot cannot climb, and when fully unmodified, is not an optimal shape to do so
Kitbot is unable to intake notes from the ground
It’s also worth noting there is still a fair amount of fab that needs to go into making the kitbot as it only comes with a small fraction of what you need to build
With this in mind, we decided to focus our Ri3D efforts towards exploring simple but effective ways to modify kitbot so that teams can easily take their base robot to another level (no need to reinvent the flywheel here)
Amp: The vast majority of our time so far has been spent exploring easy ways to modify kitbot to be able to score a note into the amp. There were to main methods of doing this.
Adding a simple, dedicated auxiliary mechanism to kit bot for doing just this task
Modify the existing kitbot shooter to be able to score in both the speaker and the amp.
We felt if either of these could be achieved, it would benefit teams the most. Unsurprisingly, the same train of thought also applies to the ground intake.
Other Observations:
Lots of teams have already pointed this out but the notes are easily damaged as the foam gets chewed up by everything.
We expect game strategy to be much more focused on offense. With kitbot being introduced, we expect the number of pushbots on the field to decrease significantly, meaning less defensive play.
Now that the base functionality of scoring into speakers is going to be fairly common, the amp is going to be your friend so that you can make sure every note scored is worth the most amount of points possible
Drive Practice! We think there will be much more value in a simple, lightly modified robot where the driver is well practiced and knows how to get the best cycle time out of their bot, when compared to spending that same time towards custom mechanisms. Not to discourage this of course, but for some teams who have limited meeting time, a low budget, and limited or no access to more advanced machining equipment, making time for drive practice is definitely something to consider.
I’m sure I’ve missed something and my team will point it out to me later but this is what we’ve got so far!
Editing the mini-documentary is taking longer than we would’ve liked so appologies for the slightly late posting. That being said, the robot reveal is ready and here so no sense in making y’all wait!
To add in some additional context which will be further covered in the mini-doc, this Ri3D was very special for us here at ACR as it was also the first ever robot build for rookie team 9449 Yellowjackets. These kids poured their hearts and souls out for 72 hours and we are so proud of how much they’ve learned in just one weekend. This bot may not end up becoming the meta-defining super-bot, but hopefully we can help to inspire other rookie teams or even teams on a budget with some simple and easy to add mechanisms this season!
Also in case you missed it, just before starting Ri3D, we interviewed the 9449 Yellowjackets for their thoughts and predictions and this is what they had to say:
