FIRST Robotics 2020 - Report 3.0

Those familiar with FIRST robotics probably know about "Bag and Tag" day.  This was, prior to the current campaign, the Tuesday evening six weeks and two days after kick off when all teams had to put their robot into a sealed storage bag until competition.  There were various ways to game the system, mostly by building multiple clone robots and only bagging the "comp" machine while you practiced and did software development with the beta versions. This was felt to favor the high resource teams.  So this year...build until you compete.  This means that we have eight weeks instead of six.  But in a practical sense you should still get things done in six....so someone can actually learn how to drive the critter.

Maybe this means teams will get a bit lazy in the early weeks.  Or will they simply do the same amount of work on a more forgiving timetable?  Let's have a look at what things look like in the middle of week three.

I should mention we lost our long Saturday session to blizzard conditions.  Yuck.  Southern California teams are laughing at us.

The CAD team has been busy.  Here's a 3D model of the robot they are expecting to build.  From this design it is pretty easy to laser cut all the parts.  Welding them together is a bit more of a task.  Keeping the entire beast under 125 pounds probably will be a challenge.  Expect the final version to have lots of "Swiss Cheese".

The above design does not have the ball pickup and transfer units on board yet.  We are still testing the prototypes.  Here's ball transfer unit version 2.0.  The bright orange bungee cord seems to work well.

I don't have a picture to show it but software has made a sensor that detects the ball when it enters the transfer device and signals the motors to run until the ball is no longer breaking the beam. Sort of like your garage door sensor.  This should automate ball collection so the drivers just need to, well, drive.

Software has been up to some other tricks as well.  Sensing the target is pretty important in this game, especially as it is at the far end of the playing field and your vision will be partly obscured.  So....they are working on both vision tracking of the reflective targets AND distance sensing.  In fact, the robot should have distance sensors on both front corners so it can read distance and angle to target.  For now these sensors are mounted on "Chairbot" the better to push it around the mock playing field.

And so it goes.  But as with humans so also it is with robots.  With new life comes the passing of the old guard.  Last year's robot being broken down for parts....sniff.