Team 2980 Presents: Cameron, our 2019 robot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBnta0IP3pw&feature=youtu.be
We finally got our reveal video edited down.
This season was hard. We had a bunch of parts get stuck in the polar vortex and we also had a few snow days of our own. Nothing worse than twiddling your thumbs waiting on parts to arrive. Unfortunately we didn’t get to weigh the robot fully until 10 AM President’s day and spent the entire day and well into the night completely rebuilding the robot, so not much practice time. Seriously the robot was fully operational for about 10 minutes before we had to put it in the bag.
Our first Access period proved fruitful though and our drivers have spent about 2 hours behind the sticks. Things held up well and I think they are currently running reasonable cycle times. If they get paired with another rocket scoring robot and a low scorer I think the ranking point might be in reach.
That said I am not sure about this year’s robot. It might be amazing, it might be horrible. It is really going to come down to how well we stack up against everyone else. Currently I am hopeful that we will be able to contribute to our alliances in a meaningful way.
Our design: Our design process: We spend week 1 brainstorming ideas which we present to our community and sponsors. They then vote on what robot they would like to see us build. In general over the past few years this process has worked out for us.
We built a robot focused around scoring hatch panels and cargo in the rocket figuring we could also score in the cargo ship. The community gave us the reach goal of being able to climb, but we ran out of both weight capacity and time.
Our drive base is the kit of parts chassis.
Lifter is 3 active stages and can reach the top of the rocket. We modeled it after the lift kit from Rev Robotics, only we made ours from scratch using 8020 and delrin rollers that we cut ourselves on the lathe. It is powered using 2 Cim motors at 10.86:1
The intake uses Churros for intake wheels powered by a can motor running through a 7:1 versaplanetary gearbox. We originally were using a redline at 4:1, but stalling the motor for about 1/2 second burned it out. Haven’t had any problems with the can motor as of yet but have some spares just in case.
Our hatch panel manipulator is 1/16 wall aluminum, Polycarbonate, and velcro. It uses 2 4 inch pistons to eject the hatch panels.
The cargo box uses 1 8 inch piston to eject the ball. The piston at the beginning of the video was one of the ones from AndyMark, but we found that the dampeners restricted the piston too much even when we had them screwed all the way out. The bimba round tube piston we are currently using does a good job of ejecting the cargo.
For sensors we are using 2 pixie cams, a wifi camera, and a usb camera for driver vision. We have programmed the robot to line up with the vision tape, but haven’t fully implemented that behavior yet. The electronics and programming team were in today to work on code, but I wasn’t there and the robot is in the bag until our last access period tomorrow.
We will be at Mount Vernon week one, and Auburn at the end of March. We are also presenting on how to make the world a better place through the power of FIRST at Houston. Hopefully we can qualify to bring our robot along, but if not then no worries.
Thank you for being a part of this great journey and best of luck to all.
Edoga
