Mini-bot or Mini-shoe?

Tonight I swapped shoes with a lift team member, literally. (As they were working in the shop and needed closed toes!) In fact, since the lift was working on preparing the aluminum box extrusion, there were more things going on simultaneously then I could take in. I’ll try and keep the words brief and the pictures plenty. The night was full of new sights, so here we go!

I promised I would give the electrical team a better shout-out. They spent a decent amount of Saturday putting together an electrical board mount, so that we don’t end up with a mess of wires like last year. They used CAD to optimize the placement of certain components and to check interferences with other critical robotics components. Below is a render of the mount integrated with the drive base model.

Tonight, the electrical and programming teams worked together to outfit the old 6WD with a sensor board and a camera mount. It’s looking good, don’t take my word for it though, here’s a snapshot:

Saturday, as we were hard at work, the drive base was being water-jetted. It took over 4 hours, but tonight the beautiful pile of “lego-pieces” arrived. I must say that this robot is looking pretty! Below are pictures of both the top and bottom sheet as well as students putting together side-panels. With the wooden jigs and a  box of pop-rivets, the drive team was well prepared for the task at hand!

I have been asked a lot of questions about the mini-bot by alumni. First, we are definitely going to have at least one or two mini-bots for competition. Second, this is being done by primarily underclassmen who worked on FTC. Also, the deployment mechanism prototype made out of VeX is both intimidating and impressive (more about that to come later).

Tonight the mini-bot team demonstrated their design climbing the pole. After a few trials, the data suggested that the current design will climb to the top in less than 4 seconds! I have read some articles on Delphi about teams climbing in 7! With a little more cheesing out of weight and refinement of design, I’m sure we can decrease that time.

Hope these pictures give a glimpse at how exciting tonight was!

Catching Up

“Once a Skunk, always a skunk!”

Hey all, this is Navid here, ready to kick off our new team-update blog. The P.R. sub-team has brought it to the attention of the whole that we have received messages from alumni and parents wanting to know what’s going on. This concept of spreading the stories and progress of the team isn’t in any way new, and it is certainly a great way to reach out to those people we hold dear and bring them into our world over the course of the season and competition.

So, I started thinking about how we’d get the word out. Maybe an online blog would be a way of communicating back to our family and friends in a way that is easy to read and easy for me to update on a daily basis. I’m excited to share with you all a bit of insight into the season, the design, the inner-workings of the team and more. Olivia and I are going to try and keep this as up-to-date and as professional as possible bear with us. This first blog is going to be a bit long, as we have a week and a half to catch up on, but we’ll try and keep the posts to reasonable sizes.

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Where to start… Well, it’s a new season, we went to Auburn High School for kickoff. This year’s game: “Logo-Motion”. As many of you have already heard about it, I won’t go into detail. However, for those of you who haven’t, here is a link to the game animation video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxujTCgQPgg

Our first week flew by as always. We started off the very next day, analyzing the game rules and strategy. After lunch, we even had a rough field set-up, where we used human players to simulate how the game would play. We had 4 rookie teams at our school as well, and had members in the shop, helping them to assemble the kit-bots they received. It was a busy day and we certainly accomplished a lot. This year has been dramatically faster in pace and seems to be even more organized than before. We even started breaking out into groups for robot concepts on Day 2!

For those of you unfamiliar with the “Rapid Prototyping Process”, students break up into small teams and rough out a robot design. This is of an extremely low-level of detail. Students talk about what type of drive train and drive base will win the game. We discuss these key features–should we have a lift? an arm? Should we use a claw to pick up the tubes? How will we play the game? What’s our strategy for autonomous? In the past, this process has been just as effective, but certainly not as concise. It always proves a great way to brainstorm ideas, and start to put those ideas to life.

Rapid Prototyping took up the first few days of the week as we discussed those ideas, talked about pros and cons and weighed our options. Ultimately we came to the conclusion by Wednesday on one thing: The drive base. The Drive base is a critical component to the robot. We picked a 6 Wheel Drive (6WD) over our other options for many reasons. A few brought up were:

-Simplicity of design and fabrication

-Speed, but possibility for low gearing (Pushing Power)

-We had significant R&D work done on a 6WD concept over the off-season. (See image below)

This drawing is a fairly accurate model of what our concept looks like. We don’t have the cutout in the front of the frame anymore (this was originally designed for some sort of kicker or effector which required additional space). I will post a more accurate representation either tomorrow or Saturday.

Tomorrow, being Friday, is our first opportunity to cut parts! Omax, our water-jetting sponsor, works with us weekly to precision cut our components for the robot. All of the truss-work, which you can see above in the frame is highly accurate and done by machine. We take student generated models, input them into Omax’s software, and the machine does the rest! (I’m exaggerating a bit, it’s a little more complicated Regardless, it’s an awesome opportunity for the team and for us, as students to get a look into the industry. We’ll take some photos tomorrow there, to post on the blog. Also, we have picked out other components for the robot, after some diligent prototyping. I’ll talk more about those systems tomorrow night. It’s exciting to see that we are already cutting parts and could have our drive frame ready to roll (pun-intended) by week 3!

I hope that this helps to patch the ties between the team and its support group. Please contact Olivia or I with any comments or concerns as we move forward. Thanks for bearing with me!