Always Improve: Outreach Robot Updates

Before the Covid 19 pandemic, we offered robot workshops and robot demos on a regular basis as part of our community outreach. With in-person outreach suspended since early March 2020, we have offered virtual outreach activities such as our FLL Jr, Girls of Steel Expo, FLL Camp, Introduction to Scratch Workshop, and FLL teams.

With goals to improve our future in-person outreach activities, a group of girls on the team worked on technical projects this past summer creating a NEW outreach bot and a redesign of the outreach chassis project. The technical goals of the projects were, 1. to alter the chassis project design to alleviate some of the issues encountered at past outreach events, such as wiring issues and an inaccessible e-board, and 2. to design an interactive robot to play a simulated FIRST game and that could be driven by participants at outreach events. But the larger goal of the project was to provide an opportunity to learn new technical skills and give newer girls to the team a chance to be more heavily involved in the design process.

A group of 10 dedicated students with a variety of skill sets and experience levels met many times over the summer, and with the help of mentors, worked to come up with constraints and specifications and the design for both robots. Many girls were able to learn CAD and design through the experience. The projects were structured so girls could individually take responsibility of each mechanism, how it would be designed, and how it would be eventually manufactured. The Chassis Project Redesign was finished mid summer and the Outreach bot is still in progress. Overall these projects exposed many students to more independence with design, helped students learn the design review and iteration process, and helped us keep busy over quarantine in the summer.

Here are some images of the CAD for the new outreach robot.