FIRST Robotics 2024 - Tournament Bound Again

And here we go again.  The FIRST robotics competition season runs for six weeks.  This year we had the longest possible gap between two events, doing a Week One and now a Week Six event.  And boy howdy, we needed every day of the interval to pull off a complete rebuild of the robot.

Elevator...gone.  Number of motors, down from 17 to 15.  Lots of pulleys, cables, brackets, wires....adios.  It is a cleaner robot and one that has survived several in testing impacts with solid objects.  We'd like more time of course, but here's what the critter could do with four days to deadline....

Actually not bad.  There's fine tuning to do.  We'd like the spin up to taking a shot to be a little shorter.  And the velocity is certainly enough to take shots from further out once the auto tracking systems are tweaked a bit.  In fact it has enough power that it broke the board on the top of our testing target.  Our drive team are confident they can handle it.

The glitches, and the promise of excellence, both are related to the robot's ability to "see" where it is on the field.  It does this with cameras, processors and software algorithms.  It can find, navigate towards and inhale game pieces.  It can go the the right spot on the field.  It can lock onto a target and adjust angles to make the shot.  Usually.

So, how many eyes does this require?

The robot needs binocular vision for three different kinds of targets, so like many spiders it has six "eyes".  Two of them - BETA and GAMMA - are right on the front of the intake, constantly searching for things that look like large, orange bagels....

Well, we'll see how it all works out.  Of course the main goal is the kids learning things.  By that standard it has been an outstanding season.  Building robots is sort of a secondary....