What improvements to your bot has your team made between qualifying for champs and attending?

FIRST General Forum
1

What have yall changed on your bots? New mechanisms? New autos/automated actions?

2

a few things were done in the few days we had…
-we found the reason our path planning did not work properly in auto
-modified our shooter/turret to make it more consistent and less likely to have cargo bounce out the hub
-added a network switch on the robot so we can work better with our vision at the event

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3

Shooting while moving. We don’t have a turret so it’s definitely a lot of work.

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4

Completely new intake and shooter. Shooting while moving ;))

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5

Our robot now has a 3 ball auto routine and can shoot from anywhere on the field (as long as I didn’t break something after we shipped the robot), for doing angled turns in auto we actually use our gyroscope for turns instead of a spin command with a timeout of .XYZ seconds. We fabricated a mount for a normal camera that we might use and replaced our gearboxes so they aren’t worn down from 2 intense regionals.

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6

Packing it in a crate vs packing it in the U-Haul to head home :smiley:

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7

Loading in the trailer and planning how to fix Saturdays battle damage in Houston. Oh and a slightly faster climber.

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8

It was basically a full rebuild.

  • New wheels (we drove the original HiGrips bald at Electric City)
  • AM14U5 screw fix, past damage repaired
  • New Thrifty 3-motor gearboxes courtesy of TTB
  • New climber also sent from TTB
  • Drastically better wiring
  • More ballast mounted better
  • New intake
  • New ball launcher
  • New secret sauce :wink:
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9

Y’all had time for improvements before worlds! Must be nice.

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10

We’ve also worked on shooting while moving. We have swerve + turret, but that does not make it easy. It is still a lot of work.

We worked on a few new autos to add to our options. Our 5-ball auto was working quite well at DCMP but a lot of other teams have autos that use that same bit of carpet, so we like to have options.

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11

Well hypothetically District teams made their improvements for District Champs instead :slight_smile:

12

A couple of relatively minor but still useful mechanical fixes:

  • Put a bridge between the middle of the upper and lower intake rollers.
  • Trimmed some weight from the climb gearboxes.
  • Replaced the intake pneumatic mounts.

For software, the programmers did a lot of work, but managed to make some really nice improvements:

  • improved the sensitivity and response of the driver controls.
  • finished dialing in our shooter for all ranges.
  • Perfected our five-cargo auto to be completely reliable.
  • Programmed a three-cargo auto for when our alliance partners may want to be the ones to go to the loading station during auto.
  • Programmed a two-cargo auto with a denial routine to grab the outside opponent cargo after we shoot and drop it in our hanger behind the pylon.

That, plus a whole lot of practice has made the team pretty happy with where they are going into Worlds. The robot is now in the Hedgehog’s trailer and on the way to Houston, for which we are eternally grateful to team 587. They gave us the time to do all this rather than having to crate it up the day after DCMP. It’s ensured that all the little and not so little things that needed doing actually got done.

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13

As long as it’s not just Russian dressing! :open_mouth:

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The Average Joes have a detailed plan to vibration-test our robot, by trailering it about 1500 miles.

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15

Ha! Those District Champs were brutal here in MI :smiley:

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16

So are you stealing one from the other side of the field or how are you doing this?

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17

After a playoff transformation of your robot into a short and heavy defensive machine to help win Electric City, there was almost nothing left to bring to Champs. It’s good that you made a full rebuild, as I’m sure that you intend to get back to offensive contribution in Houston.

Looking forward to reconnecting in Roebling.

18

Yea we should have built a turret for the season but we didn’t. We just have swerve and thought that was enough. It’s really cool to watch the whole robot adjust and rotate while driving though.

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19

We don’t have either. It still got us to champs, but we’ll see how it goes.

20

The way I see it is that driver practice is more important than any particular robot mechanism, but it does obviously help to have more features.

I believe that most ok robots can improve tremendously in performance from just a ton of drivers practice.

1 Like