Assembly and Field Build

The competition robot assembly began today. The swerve modules were mounted to the new drive rails. Next the frame was squared up and secured. The top brain pan and bottom belly pan were cut on the router and are ready to be installed. Electronics will start going in on Saturday.

The alliance grid was finished tonight. Manufacturing will be working on the cable protector and barrier next. Charging Station parts are getting laser cut on Friday.

Scheduling and Prototyping

Today we had a discussion in the CAD team about the schedule and where we stand. Currently CAD zero subsystems complete. If we were to unrealistically say we’d get CAD complete and ship the first version by next week it would take manufacturing about two weeks to complete the parts and assemble. That would put us around week five for a functioning robot. We have a week one competition so we need time before then to program and drive the robot.

It is impossible to keep all of our same goals for the first version of the robot and complete CAD in a week. So we talked about which items we could remove from the first version of the robot. The current plan is to finish the buddy carry, and the arm for the first version. The team agreed to hold off on refining a floor intake for the first version.

We plan on making use of a released intake(not floor intake) for the first version. We will continue to prototype a floor intake but it won’t hold up progress on the entire robot. This will allow us to get a robot to programming faster, and allow us to start practicing sooner.

With our schedule cleared up the prototyping group continued to test vectored intake wheels. They increased the number of vectored intake wheels on the front shaft. This improved the prototype significantly. It was able to some times center the cone now. The position of the back roller still causes too much friction sometimes and the cone will get stuck.

Next we took an old prototype and put it on the table to simulate replacing the back roller with a smooth surface. This worked amazing well to center the cones. On top of the table is a piece of poly carbonate to reduce friction. This worked well enough so we’ll probably end up exploring removing or changing the location of the back roller more on Saturday.

That brings us to the next problem we’ve discovered with the vectored intake wheels. Currently our prototype requires the game piece to be close to parallel to the robot in order to intake.

This is a significant down grade in performance over the combined dual weed wacker. The combined dual weed wacker was able to intake cones in all orientations besides tip pointing towards robot. We are exploring ways to increase the angle the vectored intake wheels can intake. On Saturday we will be trying 4″ vectored intake wheels to see what that changes. Saturday is a long meeting and we have a big list of things to try. See you afterwards!