The first week of build season was hectic yet successful. Starting with a five hour brainstorming session following icy roads on kickoff morning, we designed, prototyped, CADed, tested new wheels, and began the chassis of our robot!

Chassis & Programming: We are currently working on a U-shaped chassis with mecanum wheels. By Thursday, programmers had received the prototyped chassis to begin testing how the wheels handled different weight distributions, driving over the scoring platforms from different orientations, and finally, we began working on PIDs. Tuesday, January 13, programmers started coding subsystems, since we had a rough idea of how the robot would turn out.

Design: During brainstorming and design sessions, we had many different ideas for ways to score points. We chose to build a robot that built the stacks internally and from bottom-up. This design includes a collector system that ‘sucks’ the totes into the robot, simultaneously aligning them, ratcheting triangles to hold up the stacks, an internal forklift and ‘claw’ that adjusts to the width of the tote or container. The stacks are then released by opening the ratcheting triangles and lowering the forklift or dropping the stacks on the ground.

Strategy: At our design and brainstorming meeting, we strove to design a robot that was simple, had a high scoring autonomous, and didn’t not force us to rely on the skills of other robots in our alliance.

We are excited for what the rest of build season will bring, and hope to make this the best robot yet!