Monthly Archives: March 2022

Last weekend, our team traveled to Monterey Bay to compete in the Monterey Bay Regional. Unlike at Hueneme Port Regional, almost our entire team went to this competition. On the first day, the pit crew and drive team drove early in the morning to Monterey and set up the pits. Inspection and robot weighing went fairly smoothly, except for a camera module that was causing the current to not properly ground. In between the inspection, we finished attaching our climb mechanism to the robot and performed some system checks with the programmers to confirm that the robot was in working order. After this, we rushed to the game field to calibrate our robot for the field. Field calibration, something our team never had the chance to do in the past, was particularly useful for optimizing the consistency of our vision alignment and planning a precise autonomous sequence. Afterwards, our drive coach and strategy lead toured the other pits at the competition to learn more about our competitors and their robots. They compiled a comprehensive list of teams’ match strategies and robot capabilities. When the practice matches began, our robot did decently well, consistently maneuvering a two-cargo autonomous routine, shooting several upper hub cargo in teleop, and climbing to the traversal bar. However, we were not able to shoot [...]

Since HPR, we’ve been hard at work upgrading Marinus for our next competition: Monterey Bay Regional.  On the mechanical side of things, we’ve redesigned our static and telescoping arm hooks to make it easier to latch onto the rungs in the hangar, aiding in our goal to have a fast, working traversal climb for MBR. For our cargo mechanism, we’ve added a small bump to better retain cargo in our claw as it moves around. There’s also been several minor mechanical fixes such as changing the drivetrain chain to 25H, adding sponsor plates, and improving camera mounts, but in general, it’s been fairly lax for the mechanical team.  Our programmers have massively improved the code to take advantage of our robot’s full capabilities. For starters, we can now shoot from the back of our robot, reducing our cycle times and achieving a two-ball autonomous routine.  Additionally, we’ve improved our limelight ball-tracking and shooting. Now, Marinus will automatically turn to approach cargo of the appropriate colour, and limelight will calculate distance from the hub to determine the appropriate shooting angle and speed.  We’ve also automated our climb to the high rung. We can now climb to the high rung in about 20 seconds, and we’re aiming for a sub-35 second traversal climb at [...]

Last weekend, we traveled down to Port Hueneme to compete in our first regional competition. The week leading up to the competition was filled with challenges, but after finishing up our cargo arm and putting some finishing touches on our climbing mechanism, we packed up for the 5 hour drive. We still had numerous challenges to overcome in the week leading up to the competition. Due to parts being backordered, our cargo arm was coming together slower than expected. The final days before competition were filled with programming and testing of intake, limelight alignment, and shooting. At the end of the week, we had a decent autonomous routine that shot one ball into the low hub and taxied out of the tarmac. Our arm was getting tuned for low hub shooting and the drive team was able to get in some practice time. The climb was also recovering from some roadblocks. After testing our climbing mechanism, we found that the end caps of the thrifty bot elevators were shearing along the 3D printed layers. Our robot dropped like a rock in our first climb, but we redesigned and increased the strength of our endcaps, elevators, and hooks. Going into the competition, we had a solid mid climb and planned to test a high climb on the practice field. [...]