Season Is Here!

We are super excited to learn about this year's game. With kickoff in early January we are preparing to design, code, and build our robot. To face the challenges of the new season with determination and a positive attitude. Watch this space for updates throughout the season.

Design Discussions and Thought Process

This game is complex with many different ways of scoring. Some of these are easier, others are more complicated. As we assess our team's capacity we've come up with a ranking of robot activities.

Things we are definitely not doing:

Shooting the algae into the net.
Score Level 4 Coral, these coral go on vertically and would likely need a three stage elevator. Which we think might be too much for us.
Climbing on the deep Cage, this will be an engineering challenge and while the 12 points are tempting, we thought it would be too much for us.

Things we would definitely like to do:

Score Coral on levels 1, 2, and 3; Levels 2 and 3 are both angled Reef branches, so we think the same mechanism should be able to work.
Load Coral from the Coral Station
Pick Coral off the ground <- based on our preliminary work this will be tricky, lots of spinning on the ground, but we are concerned about congestion and defense that might limit our abilities.

Things that would be nice:

Remove Algae from Reef
Some kind of shallow Cage climb
Ability to process Algae

Robot Design

The general form that we settled on was an angled elevator (basically the bot we should have build two years ago). A box attached to the elevator that holds the Coral and is capable of ≈30° of rotation will be the main scoring mechanism (maybe more). Our current thoughts about the intake are that it would be on a side adjacent to the elevator, this way we don't need to worry about the orientation. As noted above, the PVC is pretty slick, although the green compliant wheels worked pretty well, if we can get some on both sides.

Coral Scoring

Here are some sketches of what our robot might look like. The dotted blue line is the axis of our elevator. The larger blue rectangle is the scoring "box", the smaller box is the coral itself.

Intake

The intake is challenging because the Coral is so slippery and likes to spin on the ground. Here is a two wheeled intake with an elbow and a wrist. The dotted green circle represents the coral.

Intake sketch delivering the coral into the indexing system.

KrayonCAD lateral view of robot. Nice view of intake in delivery position

Starting configuration, our elevator will be close to the upper allowable limit.

Coral Indexing

There are two sets of belts running from the intake to the scoring box. Note that we don't need to alter the rotation of the Coral. Initial testing indicated that Coral self aligns reasonably well.

Level 2 Scoring

Showing the orientation for scoring L2. This will require a bit of a "shot" as the end of the scoring box is ≈10" from the end of the Reef branch. Preliminary prototyping suggests this is a viable strategy.

Level 3 Scoring

The orientation for level 3 scoring is shown here. This is much more of a hand-off then anything else. There is some data from the Ri3d groups that Level 1 maybe a bit tricky because the coral is bouncy, will need to address this in the upcoming weeks.

Climber Idea

Using our elevator to aid in our end-game climbing seems like a good idea. Here is a simple hook that is placed on the top of the scoring box, which interfaces with the hole on the bottom of the cage to allow the robot to climb by lowering the elevator.

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