Week 1: The New Shiny

 

On Jan 8th, the FIRST Robotics Competition game for the 2022 season was unveiled to the 3000+ teams across the globe.

Quick Recap: FRC is a competitive high school robotics program modeled after professional sports, partnering high school students with industry mentors to build a robot, and develop communication, leadership, and life skills. This is not battle bots, this is a sporting competition where all participants are encouraged to embrace 'Gracious Professionalism': compete at your best, and treat your fellow competitors with empathy and respect.

The robots are conceptualized, designed, fabricated, assembled, and tested all in about 2 months. They can be up to 140 pounds, 3-to-6 feet tall, and are tele-operated-ly controlled by a student driver. 

Quick Disclaimer: These posts were originally written as a sponsor/family share, so it's not quite FRC techno-babbly with a lot of the details, but still gets the point across for our season.

Onward!

2022-01-15

Rapid React (presented by the Boeing Company)

First weekend is always breaking down the game - how do we score points, what actions will a robot need to take. The first weekend is always answering the what and the why, without answering 'how'.

Our team this year is 18 students - very fresh due to the ...issues... of the past 2 years. We have 12 mentors with mechanical, software, entrepreneurship, even woodworking backgrounds working alongside.

Once we have the robot action requirements settled, our first week is imagining concepts and starting to test and prototype. Now is when we get into mechanisms, and produce mock-ups of wood to quickly test critical dimensions. The students use CAD (computer aided design) to draw and measure out their mechanisms, ensuring the mock-ups are correctly sized, and all the mechanisms will fit together in the complete robot. This year, we are looking at 3 major mechanisms:

• an intake to grab the game piece from the floor
• a launcher to score the game piece in the Hub
• a climber to earn maximum points in the end-game period

Each mechanism has specific requirements for how to function: how quickly a Cargo ball is collected, minimum and maximum distance from goal where we can shoot from, etc. and the prototypes are used to confirm that the mechanism concept can meet the system criteria.

With that - Pictures!

Spoiled team has a 48" touchscreen - doing some geometry review using the CAD software.

Assembling the intake prototype.

We use our in-house (in school?) 4'x8' table router to cut wood mockups. Wood is cheaper, and cuts 2-3 times faster, making it great for high fidelity prototypes.

Our launcher prototype assembled! The black wheel is a 4" flywheel, hoping to launch the ball (accurately) up to about 10 feet. (Hiding in the background is our 2020 competition robot, before that all got shut down.  )

-B