Competition Week 2

Bots sitting, ready to go

For me, this was a very busy week. I actually didn't make it into the lab at all with work constraints, and had to follow along through our Slack channels. This week was more competition prep: drive practice, software tuning, breaking and fixing things as often as possible. On top of this, we are rapidly approaching our first competition, and needed to plan out our unbag session. This week we had our students plan and prep everything they would need to successfully tackle the numerous tasks required during our 6 hour access window.

Unbag! Er - Robo-Plague!

This Saturday was supposed to be our organized and coordinated unbag session. 6 hours to be used on our competition robot: mounting our v3 elevator, updating our intake to v2, re-managing all the electrical and pneumatic tasks required to have the robot up and running once again, and providing as much software tuning time as possible. We prepared all week - listing out every difference and mod that our practice robot had that was not yet installed on the competition bot. We started building surgery cases - tool cases with all the tools and hardware needed for each task. We started assigning people to individual tasks, created Gantt charts for when and who was doing work. We had plans for parts to fabricate during unbag as competition spares to throw into the bag at the end of the day. We were good to go-ish.

And then roboplague struck.

And I, as a mentor coordinator to help with driving this unbag schedule wasn't there, so the plan contained a few more assumptions and ambiguous clauses. (Step 1: Install shooter. Step 2: Install elevator. Step 3: Victory.) This is perfectly OK, the students really learned a new lesson in things they, well, didn't know they didn't know. Once I was back up to speed, we progressed and got the plan together.

Friday night I got to type a super fun Slack message (and read it in my head like a 1960's mission commander):

Team, I need a Go/No-go for unbag tomorrow. Mechanical, Electrical, Pneumatics, Software... Blah blah blah.

I had fun writing it. I didn't have fun seeing our lead mechanical and lead electrical students out sick, key working students unavailable or otherwise sick, and even a mentor was sick. We had to cancel our planned time for unbag and cancel a drive practice session with friends 2910 and 5803. We will now likely have to complete 2 unbag sessions during the week, fighting for time between unbag and packing for our first event. Our head coach has already given his directive for unbag - we have tasks that must be complete, but likely will not have every key student available. We will complete tasks so long as we have one lead and worker student available, and may simply have one or two more mentor hands helping out than usual. To me, that sounds fair. Robo-plague is no fun, and well, the robot in the bag currently doesn't have an elevator. Things need to happen for us to compete, so we'll make due with what we have. Next week will be very exciting with both unbag and competition notes.

Staged parts... and a sewing machine...

So what did we do all day if we didn't open up the robot? Well, more of the same, with a smaller crew. More software tuning. Preparing more spares and adding more details to our unbag plan. And we have a new prototype team working on a super lightweight repeatable HAB level 2 climber. And we watched a bunch more matches at local and other events. Pretty productive day in my opinion.

Retractions from Competition Week 1 Post

Apparently we do make reveal videos... Unknowingly for pretty much our entire mentor staff, our students were secretly filming drive practice, finding music online, and created our first ever robot reveal video! I think it's great that the students were passionate enough to just go out and make this, and it is a nice showing of our robot.

Quote of the Week:

Student 1: This is my GPA. <makes downward motion>

Student 2: In our lives there is only GP. There is no A.

(Yes, this actually happened...)