Team 2980's 2016 Open Source Robot

FIRST General Forum
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So once again we will be publishing as much as possible about our team’s robot. This year we are hoping to post weekly youtube videos updating our progress.

Our first week we host an inhouse design competition. Our team splits up into several sub-teams. Each sub-team comes up with a complete design for the robot. We then present all 3 designs to our community and the community votes on which robot we should build. This year each team will be using the following worksheet to do initial planning. While the worksheet might change based on the nature of the game, these are all important things to consider.

Please feel free to edit/modify this worksheet, or share your own.

Thanks!

Edoga

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On Sunday our team split up into 3 separate groups, and each group is developing a design for this year’s challenge. The teams will then present on Friday to our local community The people in attendance range from parents of team members, district faculty and administration, to members of from our local NAVY base. We also have a number of engineers, and representatives for our various sponsors who will attend.

The teams have now made some progress and tomorrow will start hammering out the difficult aspects such as specific dimensions of various parts of the robot.

The teams started out with a list of potential objectives that they wanted the robot to accomplish, and are working out the ways in which they might design the robot to complete those tasks.

Currently it looks like one of the groups is focused on shooting in the high goal of the tower and attacking a few specialized defenses. The second group is looking at being more of a breaker bot/assist bot focusing on all of the defenses and having the ability to carry balls to either be scored in the low goal or handed off to an alliance partner. The final team is focused on a couple of defense, would like the ability to shoot for the high goal, (though mainly focused on scoring in the low goal, and climbing the tower.

I think most of the teams have settled on the rhino tank drive, and our team ordered all of the parts necessary to make them ourselves, but as a back up plan the teams are strongly considering using pneumatic wheels of which we have 8 currently in stock. There is some concern about getting stuck on some of the defenses with wheels, but I personally am confident that the teams can get past this.

Here is a link to a google folder with right ups on each team’s progress.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5pLE9BEnhTyXzdSY0pRS2Ntc3M&usp=sharing

Best of luck to all!

Edoga

3

Ok, so first off…My apologies. We have fallen way behind on posting. We are sort of in a mad scramble to get things done early because of some up coming things, and I dropped the ball on this one.

So week1 was pretty good. I’m not used to the team being this big and especially this young. We had a large turn over last year and our team is mostly freshman. The nice part is that we have a number of kids who participated in FTC in 8th grade, and a few that have been with us through a couple years of FLL also.

During week 1 we split into several groups (this year 3). The groups do research and game analysis and then design a robotic solution to the years challenge. The design teams reached similar ends with slightly different priorities which effected their robot designs.

Brianna’s team focused mainly on shooting and designed a robot similar to the Robonauts 2012 rebound rumble robot with an arm designed for the drawbridge, portcullis, and sally port.

Josephs team decided to go for a buster robot capable of defeating all of the defenses using arms and a catapult for shooting.

Cameron’s team designed a robot around the idea of being a support bot delivering boulders to teams good at shooting, breaking some defenses, and scoring in the low goal on the tower.

All three designs called for the rhino tank tread system.

The community couldn’t decide on any of the designs, so they gave us a list of priorities instead.

  1. Be able to get through as many defenses as possible, especially the low bar.
    1b) Be able to score during autonomous.
  2. Be able to score boulders in the low goal.
  3. Be able to score boulders in the high goal
  4. Scale the tower

I expressed concern that the team would not be able to get the rhino drive train done in time so we decided to build two drive trains, one using pneumatic wheels and a modified kitbot that we had from years past, and the other using the rhino system.

Turned out Andy Mark came through in a big way and the rhino drive train arrived over a week ago. :slight_smile:

The robot’s name is duplicity because of all of the different roles it should be able to take on in a match.

Here is a week 2 update a few kids put together…

https://www.youtube.com/embed/q0z19lVVaFM

Week 3 was also pretty productive.

We had a 3 day weekend because of the end of the semester/teacher work day. Today we fired up the electronics for the first time.


This is a picture of it getting worked on on Saturday. I somehow don’t have a picture of everything blinking nicely. :frowning:

We also tested a shooter prototype today which is included in the video shot today that I will hopefully post tomorrow.

Our welder came in and got a ton of stuff done for the robot and is working on the final shooter which should be done tomorrow! So…I can almost breath.

Again, sorry for not posting more sooner.

Edoga

4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Czmhj5cIM Week 3 video…Hopefully we spelled robot right this time. :-p

Edoga

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Looking good! The finished product should look super nice.

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week 4 video1

So the plan was to be driving by the end of our meeting on Sunday. We technically made it, but the maiden wasn’t pretty and…

So moving forward to Monday… We got things wired enough that we could comfortably drive!!!

Yesterday we went even further and tested out our actuators and drove over some of the defenses before the battery died and we learned that all of our batteries are dead because chargers work better when they are plugged in. ;-(

We did manage to spin up our intake/shooter, and successfully get through the portcullis and low bar. We are going to try a skid plate because we got hung up on the rough terrain.

Didn’t try the rock wall, cheval de frisk, or draw bridge.

For the draw bridge we may have to modify the arms a bit and we should know more on Saturday.

edoga

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Looking good guys keep up the good work!

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