Introduction
Team 2053, Southern Tier Robotics (STR), present our 2024 Fall offseason robot, a copy of the fabulous Crescendo robot built by Team 9496 LYNK earlier this year.
You can see info on our original 2024 competition season robot in this reveal thread here. Our original robot competed at the Pittsburgh Regional and the Tech Valley Regional, and for the first time in team history also competed at the BattleCry @ WPI offseason event last May, where the team was selected by alliance 15 and made it all the way to Match 29, the lower final.
More Information About Our Team’s Goals
After wrapping up the season before the summer break, the team made the decision that building a new robot from the ground up would be an important part of our fall onboarding and training for new and returning students, as we weren’t fully satisfied with some of the elements of the original robot. We liked the overall robot role given our team’s capabilities (swerve drive, score in amp, shoot near subwoofer, climb) but we felt the original design could have performed better and so we set about finding another robot to draw inspiration from.
We had two primary concerns with the original robot we wanted to improve: 1) the floor intake for notes was set inboard of the swerve modules making it difficult to collect notes from the source and 2) the note shooter had horizontally opposed flywheels which did not allow us to change release angle and did not impart much velocity/distance on the shot. With some back and forth we, like many other teams it seems, ultimately decided to build our own version of Team 9496’s robot, with a few changes to individual parts to leverage our own specific manufacturing resources.
In addition to our desire to improve our robot’s performance, we also wanted to provide a learning opportunity for students returning to our team or joining our team for the first time this fall. Last year we received student feedback that more individuals wanted “hands-on” time building the robot, and we felt this was a great way to accomplish that. Most of our new students would be coming in without prior FIRST experience and this would allow them to participate in a “complete” build season before next January. We will continue our training by back-filling the part of build season we did not cover (kickoff, game analysis, prototyping) with a mock-kickoff sprint using an old FRC game before the end of November.
Robot Photos, Videos, and Specs
Robot the night before our first event:
Robot in OnShape CAD:
Amp Test Video: https://imgur.com/a/S70kTo8
Speaker Test Video: https://imgur.com/a/Jzf7w0d
Robot Specifications:
- SDS MK4i Swerve with L3+ gearing and Falcon motors
- Top and bottom shooter rollers powered by Falcon motors
- Indexer roller powered by Falcon motor with beam break sensor to stop note automatically before entering the shooter
- Undertaker style intake with powered top and bottom rollers
- 2x Climber arms powered by Falcons with MAXPlanetaries
- 4x corner PiCams in 3D Printed Mk4i top-mounts
- 2x OrangePis and network switch mounted under shooter for vision processing
Team Info and Resources
Upcoming Events:
- Rah-Cha-Cha Ruckus in Rochester, NY on 10/26/24
- Tech Valley Robot Rumble in Albany, NY on 11/02/24
Our GitHub: Southern Tier Robotics FRC 2053 · GitHub
Our OnShape for Offseason Robot: link
Our Team Website: https://team2053.org/
A huge thank-you goes to Team 9496 for their inspiration of this project and published resources that helped bring it to completion. We look forward to competing over the next two weekends with our new robot!
