FIRST Robotics 2023 - Week One Report (Getting Unserious)

Although FIRST Robotics is a very competitive program, and our team like most is modeled on the template of a small engineering firm....well, that doesn't mean we can't have fun.

There is a tradition from Year One of competition whereby we have a whiteboard for cartooning in our pit area.  Mostly for happy "sleep tight" messages for all the robots.  Random bits of cartoon art show up here and there on scrap throughout the build season.

We are operating in a school shop area, and while the daytime users are typically not doing much with aluminum it would be really bad if somebody decided to cut up all our stock some morning.  So for a Hands Off signal, either on raw materials or partially finished parts, our policy is to apply red duct tape.

As the robot begins to take form the media/pr sub team is up to various antics.  Old bumper material with our identifying team number on it is too good to be thrown away.  One of the things that has been sewn together is this....ummm....Pageant Sash?  I agreed to model it for posterity.

I'll conclude with what might or might not be high level humor.  The discussion of how the omnidirectional drive system can become entirely fluid and accurate delves into some very complex math.  This is part of the actual discussion.  Or they are totally punking me  It's hard to tell.

Using that I get yaw as arcsin(roll/(arccos(cos(pitch)cos(roll))) or arccos(pitch/(arccos(cos(roll)cos(pitch)), which we can plug into the rotation matrix to find our x/y values.