Preparing for Sacramento, we’ve upgraded our robot and strategy based on Pinnacles insights. Here’s our progress.
After lots of hard work over the past week preparing for and attending Pinnacles Regional, we gathered together on Wednesday to debrief about our performance at the competition. During our time together, we split up into three groups in order to evaluate the aspects of our performance – the pit team, strategy team, and scouting team.
For the pit, everyone agreed that our indexer was our weakest subsystem due to the 50% jam rate, even though we got lucky and it performed closer to a 95% rate at Pinnacles, we wanted to learn from our mistakes and continuously improve the robot.
We also rewatched all our matches from Pinnacles, and compared our scouting data and saw that our outtake was outtaking the coral much faster than we needed at the angel of our outtake, so we redesigned it with the help of the strategy team and our driver Arman who did a phmonel job at Pinnacles.
Lastly, the scouting team has undergone many big decisions and renovations as well, such as an automatically selected ‘Leave’ and an alert to remind scouters to click from auto to teleop, this is allowing us to improve the accuracy of our data. We are also trying to share our app with other teams, so we modified our app for all others to use it and posted details on our GitHub and website.
Joining together as a whole team, we discussed our strengths, weaknesses, our past flaws, and how to build a more competitive robot for the next competition, Sacramento Regional, concluding on the remodeling of the intake, indexer, and end effector in reflection of what we observed at the competition.
On Friday, we continued our discussion and finalized the CAD for the new intake, indexer, and end effector. Completing these designs marks a significant step in refining our robot’s functionality for the upcoming competition. To ensure future documentation and reduce mistakes in assembly, we also created exploded views of the assembly. This not only promotes good documentation practices but also allows less experienced team members to better understand how different components fit together and why things work the way they do.
With the robot undergoing design changes, we also updated the tech binder and pit display slideshow to reflect the latest modifications. We took inspiration from the Churrobots 8048 and Buchanan Bird Brain 1671 for this. Thanks guys! We were really impressed with your displays, and we learned a lot!
On Saturday, we began strategic planning to redesign our robot for the Sacramento Regional. With the blueprint for the intake and end effector finalized in CAD, we are making progress and the confidence in our robot has surged as we approach the next competition. The team has worked endlessly to create a more refined and competitive robot on the aspects of hardware, control systems, and software.
On the hardware side, we disassembled the elevator, machined a non-tilted one, and assembled the new indexer and intake.
Meanwhile, the control system team made spare e-chains for the elevator and outtake, wired the beta bot’s swerve drives, and tested the Kraken motors for the new subsystems.
Over on software, driver practice and auto testing were in full swing as we refined our game plan to maximize autonomous points. We also worked on vision alignment and fine-tuned our paths in PathPlanner. Additionally, the software team began programming the new end effector, utilizing simulations to ensure precision and efficiency.
Throughout the day, we remained focused on executing our tactical upgrades. The elevator was machined, new bumpers were started, and the outtake was completed. We also reworked the indexer and end effector while machining spare parts, ensuring everything was assembled in accordance with the exploded view.
On Sunday, the team made significant improvements to the intake system by decreasing the acquisition zone to reduce weight. Our original comp Beta bot had a 23in the acquisition zone, but now we’ve made it 19.5in. This is the first time in history we have chosen to sacrifice intake acquisition in favor of an end effector, and it was a really big step for our design team and our pros and cons weighing of different designs. This adjustment allows for a greater focus on optimizing other subsystems without compromising efficiency too much. Originally, the intake had frequent jamming and slow intaking. With the modified intake, coral can now be delivered into the indexer with greater precision, eliminating jamming issues and ensuring a smoother transfer. By increasing the precision, we can also spin the motors much faster and intake at insanely fast speeds with a touch-it, own-it element. This also means that we do not get the opportunity to improve our autos, and we’re really excited, as autos have always been something we’ve struggled with. (But by having a practice field in the last two years, we’ve been improving!)
Beyond the intake, the team has completely redesigned the end effector to enhance coral and algae consumption. The new end effector will function as a gripper, allowing for the efficient collection of algae directly from the floor while also incorporating a color sensor for precise coral detection and distance from the reef. This added functionality ensures that the robot can distinguish between game pieces, leading to a more intelligent and effective strategy during matches. Isn’t object detection great? Along with our redesign, we can now place algae into the barge, and we’re really excited to test this during week 10. With these advancements, the team is steadily progressing toward a more robust and competitive design, ensuring our robot is prepared for peak performance at the Sacramento Regional.
Thanks for reading our blog! See you in the next blog and the mad dash to assemble and test everything before leaving for Sacramento, our Reefscape travel competition.
