Build Season Week 1 Blog
After exciting anticipation for the game reveal over winter break, we gathered to watch FIRST’s live stream. We went straight to reviewing the game manual and brainstorming robot strategies. Our first few days of the season were spent honing in on our robot’s functional requirements and strategy. We also met with the FRC teams BREAD, GravitechX, and NerdHerd to get an outside perspective as well as exchange ideas. After deciding our initial strategy, we researched design ideas, taking inspiration from past games and open alliance teams. Before committing to any specific robot design, the team split into Design Groups, each tasked with exploring separately to avoid the entire team fixating on just one design. These teams focused on analyzing scoring potential, identifying challenges, and understanding the game's nuances to optimize gameplay efficiency., Then, we reconvened to collaborate and discuss overarching designs to decide what we would need to prototype. We decided to prototype a ground intake that picks up coral from all orientations and a climbing mechanism inspired by Rust Hounds from Ri3d. In conjunction with the prototyping groups, a separate group focused on designing the first iteration of our Alphabot The Alphabot combines our off-season project, a two-stage cascading elevator, [...]
