With the start of the new year begins the start of a new FRC season! FRC is First Robotics Competition and it is a worldwide competition with the goal of designing a 125-pound robot within six weeks to complete a predefined set of challenges on a basketball court. What challenged you to have to complete changes every year, sometimes you have to pick up blocks and move them, other times you have to pick up balls and move them, this year the main challenge is to shoot 7-inch dodgeballs into a 9-foot high goal from anywhere on the basketball court. There is also a unique game element which is a bar in the center of the field in which you attempt to hang on and balance with your other two alliance partners in each match. I’m not going to go into all the rules and different aspects of the game because that would just take to long so here is the game manual and if you are interested you can check it out.
Every year at the kickoff of the FRC season when they release the game elements and the challenges we have to complete Techgarage hosts a robot in three days build marathon with about 11 teams. We basically put in 14 hours plus days for three days straight in an attempt to get the robot done and driving as quick as possible.
This year we had a good turn out on team members and had 12 members attend the kickoff and come back for the next three days to help build the robot. They were also all skilled enough to build the aspects of the robot that I had in my head and after we worked as a team to develop our strategy. Our goal with this game was to shoot balls with a flywheel shooter attached to a turret to allow for easy aiming. We are also going to have a scissor lift on each side of the robot which will allow us to have a short robot that can still extend to reach the hight of the bear that we have to hang onto.
We ended up with this basic drive train which uses mecanums and allows us to strafe and drive in any direction. We also had a roller intake that was extra wide to help grab balls easier. The balls then get funneled to the back of the robot where they can be stored for shooting and fed into the shooter.
We also finished half of the scissor lift which will be used to hook onto the bar in the end game. The first iteration had lots of bearings was very heavy and not to mention costly. We will start working on a second version within the next week to minimize these problems.
This season is looking pretty promising already and with the amount of progress we have made in the past three days, I think we will have a lot of time to refine the robot and practice driving which in FRC is one of the most important parts if we want to win.
Devin Willis 