2023 Charged Up: Build Season Update
Technical Project Manager
Build season was a huge learning experience with everyone. Starting with kickoff on January 7th through the design process, we initially started off with a design of six subsystems on our robot but by the end of the build season, we had condensed down to three. After building Bubbles, the first iteration of our robot, and watching it compete at our Week 0 event, we realized that we had to make a few major improvements to our robot in order for it to be competitive. So over the 3 weeks in between Week 0 and the Week 3 Miami Valley Regional, our first competition, our claw subsystem team worked hard to make those changes and increase the competitive ability of our robot. We are so excited to see our ever improving robot compete in the Greater Pittsburgh Regional!
Programming
We had an amazing build season, teaching everyone new skills while creating exciting code! With a relatively new team of programmers, everyone learned and grew so much these past few months! Some of the controls we’ve implemented include automating the process to line up and score a game pieces by finding our position on the field and calculating the angle necessary to score. We’ve also created many modes for the first 15-second autonomous period (and in the process of testing more!), such as scoring 2 game pieces or balancing on the charging station structure. We are so excited for the Greater Pittsburgh Regional to see it all come together!
Mech
Build season has consisted of many changes and overcoming many challenges. We started off with six subsystems (intake, claw, turret, arm, hopper, and chassis) and ended with only three (claw, arm, and chassis). A large amount of time was spent prototyping and testing and making the changes we needed to have the best robot possible. Even though a lot of time was spent waiting for parts to arrive, we still made a great robot that performed beyond our expectations at the Miami Valley Regional and we can’t wait to see how well it does at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional.
Arm & Structure
Arm
When first deciding the structure for the robot, we wanted to allow for the best ease of programming and driving. To do that we decided to create an arm with 3 key joints for better driving capabilities. We had a motor driven turret, a motor driven shoulder pivot, and a pneumatically actuated telescoping arm. Having the telescoping arm driven by pistons would make programming and driving easier so we decided to revive the recently relearned skill on our team of pneumatics. We decided on having two large pistons that would move the arm either backwards or forwards. This allowed us to have only 2 acting pistons but 4 different positions of extension. Because this would sometimes conflict with a rule of only extending in one direction, we decided that after our first competition we would shift the arm to only extending forward. After our competition, we found that since we had programmed in limits to avoid these fouls, this was not a problem and was not as big of an inconvenience as we thought it would be.
At first, the arm was placed on top of a motor-powered turret that allowed it to spin, which helped it align with the game piece nodes. (Note: During MVR*, the turret led to some unfortunate reliability issues, so the team quickly decided to remove the turret from the robot to eliminate the problem. The arm now rests directly on four support bars attached to the chassis. More details found in the MVR Blogpost!)
Chassis
Based on team experience and the given timeline for swerve modules to arrive, we chose to go with a West Coast Drive drivetrain. For the past few years, we have been using a plate and standoff drivetrain which is fairly similar to the West Coast Drive. This allowed for us to gain experience doing something new while also understanding our limits in experience.
One major change we made during build season was the type of gearbox. Initially, the gearbox had the motors pointing inwards taking up space in the interior of the robot where other mechanisms needed the space. Changing our gearbox to a reverse gearbox with the motors pointing out towards the wheels allowed for more space for the turret/arm and on the electrical board.
Claw
Originally, the claw was designed to be a pincer mechanism powered by pneumatics that would be able to reorient cones from various directions. It was meant to work in conjunction with the intake from within the robot after a piece had been intaked and sent through a hopper system. However, after assessing how our robot performed at the Week 0 Scrimmage and the status of the intake and hopper, the team made the decision to scrap the intake and hopper and redesign the claw to intake and place pieces by itself. This led to a week of prototyping and iterating until we decided on a 4 wheel intake that we have now. For MVR, we chose to only pick up cubes with the earlier iteration and then kept designing until we got to the claw we have now that picks up cones and cubes.
Electrical
Electrical is made up of various components, such as designing the electronics board, wiring, crimping, and pneumatics. We get two chances to decide the placement of all of our fragile and magnificent electrical components. One of the struggles we had at the start of the season was the process of drilling and re-drilling holes, some larger than others, to discover the best placement. Even though we accidentally drilled a large hole in the 1st robot’s e-board, it was all part of the learning process, and it made our 2nd robot even better. It seems incredible to me that we, the electrical team, are a part of building an amazing robot, putting in so much time and effort to build and find solutions for both electronic and pneumatic difficulties alike. Going onto pneumatics, this was full of much more adversity, needless to say. We were continuously learning everything about pneumatics. This season, we ended up building 2 successful robots using pneumatics systems, and we all learned a tremendous amount, such as listening for air leaks, troubleshooting with the solenoids, or replacing the countless manifolds. Both pneumatics and electronics challenged us and allowed us to constantly learn and have fun.
Design
Throughout the season, the design subteam worked in various subsystems to create the CAD that the robot would be built based on. This season in particular, we experimented with using a document-based system and updated references and were able to sync everything decently. Although, we have definitely improved through the season and after Week Zero, we hope to make changes next year like creating more effective version control and more effectively integrating subsystems.
