Finished Practice Robot

Today we continued work on the practice robot. We finished the routing of electrical and pneumatics, we re-rigged the lift roping with turn-buckles and we had a robot running to test!

Starting at 9 this morning, teams began to join us. We had maybe 4 or 5 teams total (I don’t recall the exact number). I’m sure we’ll see a lot more over the course of the weekend. Some of these teams present were: Both Saints robotics, 1258 and 1899, 488, Samamish High School and Seattle Lutheran (Sorry if I missed anyone). To get prepared for this, we had the entire team down cleaning, vacuuming and preparing the finished field. We blew up game pieces, fixed popped ones, laid out carpet, etc.

We had the opportunity to see some teams practice driving, attempt to score autonomously, and deploy minibots. It’s always fun to see how other teams approached the same design challenge, but in different ways.

Our own robot didn’t make it out of the shop, but it was finished around dinner time. When I say finished, I mean fully operational. On top of this, we have our final robot (which is a slightly better replica of the practice bot) almost done mechanically. The lift was rigged and mounted to the drive base. Some electrical has been mounted, but we still have a lot to add before it’s ready to bag and tag on Tuesday. With a practice robot ready, we can continue to practice and work after our robot has been shipped!

Even though everything is prepped and theoretically functional, we didn’t test all systems today. The most complex system  to program and control is the lift, the programmers played with their PID values and lift code to perfect speed, accuracy and height. With astute detail to perfection, we ended up with a lift which can rise to all of the necessary heights by the end of the night, engage the pneumatic brake and hold position. Here’s a video of the fruit of the programming labor:

(Bear in mind that was merely 65% of Full power )

The pushing mechanism/popper was tested yesterday, so this wasn’t played with. The arm to lower the Raptor claw to the floor and the claw pistons themselves weren’t tested. These are much easier to prepare than the lift though, as you saw with the piston, it was practically ready to work as soon as it was wired. With the pistons, the programmers can essentially program the air to push the piston entirely out, or bring it in. With a two state function to control, this should hopefully be a task which we can finish early in the morning.

Tomorrow, I think that we can realistically have our robot driving on the field before lunch. We need to test the arm/end effector before mounting our neon green practice bumpers, but we should be there quickly. With that done, we can test it in it’s natural environment, with game pieces, pegs and maybe even a robot to play defense on us! We can also test the autonomous (hopefully). As of right now, it should drive forward, follow the line, stop short of the pegs to score. If we can include the lifting to height and popping, we should be able to score.

Debugging the Practice Bot

The critical decision to extend the meeting an hour was needed. We had about as many triumphs as struggles tonight and the days to ship can be counted on one hand *Counting tomorrow, which we won’t be meeting on!*

The Raptor Claw assembly is finally complete. We now have the pusher frame mounted and riveted, the scissor lift works (at least by hand). We have yet to power this with air though. Anyways, with this completed, we were then able to mount it on the robot. It’s all coming together.

With most of the critical features on, we took another total weight. We are at 105lbs with the current practice bot. The final design should be a little lighter, because of a few different things, mainly the lighter lift. Speaking of which, below are two pictures of the final drive and final lift, in their current states:

Now here are a few pictures of the whole thing (The practice robot), after weighing:

The main struggle of tonight was finding out that the lift, in it’s position at the time wasn’t in it’s initial lowest position. This meant that we needed to move the improperly placed solenoids and change some of the pneumatic set up. It took a decent amount of time from the meeting, just to fix placement, then to fix the rollers/roping on the lift. With the lift no longer limited by mechanical stops, or obstructed by electrical or pneumatic fixtures, we had a robot, which is almost entirely the programmer’s now.

Speaking of which, the programmers have a rough job this year. We sought out a simple design, a simple drive-base, simple height raising mechanism and hopefully a simple gripper. As Mr. Steele and Ken said tonight, this may easily be the most complex machine we have ever made (However, it may also be one of our finest, assuming we get it running). Thomas has his hands full at the moment as the Programming lead. With our old mentor gone from the team, he has a lot on his hands and I wanted to point out that getting 8+ Motors, 8+ Pneumatic Pistons, a gear shifting drive-base and other features to work in unison is no small feat! Here’s a shot of him debugging his code last night, as we interrupted his time with the robot:

Two more conjoined things to bring up:

1) Our tubes are taking damage, we really need to take care of them, below are two pieces I saw deflated tonight and we have one more in the shop (A triangle). Hopefully some of the other teams can bring a few!

2) Tomorrow we don’t have a meeting, but we want to finish a few things and beautify the field for Saturday as we are expecting company. If you are reading this post and are free tomorrow after school, the more hands we have down in the gym, the quicker we can get things done. Thanks for the help Skunks!

Also, don’t forget: We are working all day Saturday and Sunday, on Monday night from 6-8 is the unveiling/ice cream ceremony, then we ship Tuesday!