ianhsieh

Last week, our team competed in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Championship in Houston from Wednesday April 19 to Saturday April 22. In the George R. Brown Convention Center Out of the over 3250 teams in the world who participate in FRC, only 620 qualify for Houston, where the best of the best compete to see who will become world champions of FIRST. Teams compete in 8 divisions of about 77 teams. Our team was in the Archimedes Division, which included several of the best teams in the world, including defending world champions 254 and 1619, several Hall of Fame teams, and other high-ranking teams such as 2056, 6036, 111, 1577, and 2468. Our robot in the pits after unloading Before competing with the best teams in the world, our team made sure that our robot (“Vertigo”) was at its peak condition. Prior to the competition, we had been testing and perfecting several autonomous routines for our matches, mainly three-piece auto and over-the-charge-station auto engage. On the mechanical side of things, the electrical team hot glued all the electrical connections to make sure no disconnections would happen mid-match, and we had also added LEDs to our robot for better communication with our team members and human player during teleop routines. Furthermore, our drive team had also practiced relentlessly before [...]

With the World Championship just a few days away, our team is busy making a few last minute changes that will hopefully further boost our robot’s performance at Houston.  After the Silicon Valley Regional, extra spares will be required for Houston, and that has been a focus for our mechanical team for much of the week. They’ve also worked on re-tensioning the elevator and cleaning out our swerve drivetrain as part of a maintenance routine on our robot. Additionally, to prevent any connection issues during matches, the electrical subteam has hot-glued the robot’s connectors in the electrical board to ensure that loose wires won’t be a problem. The most noticeable change to our robot is the new LEDs running down on either side of the elevator, which are useful for many things during a match, such as indicating the alliance color and signaling to our teammates about getting a cone or cube based on the color. Our programming subteam is hard at work fine-tuning the elevator and intake to make our scoring more reliable and efficient. Most of their efforts have been on improving our autonomous routine during autonomous mode during our matches. They’vebeen trying different auto routines, such as three-piece auto and acquiring a piece by going over the charge station. Since we will be facing the top [...]

Week 3 was a very decisive week for the whole team. We started off the week with design presentations of our prototypes. We narrowed down our options for our robot. We decided on 5 main designs: The Angled Elevator with 4 bar and layered intake, the Angled Elevator with 4 bar, RI3D grabber and extending wheels orienter, the 4 Bar Lead screw, (“Wheeled”) layered intake with a fixed bar orienter, the 971 Arm, RI3D grabber with extending wheels orienter, and the 971 arm with wheeled Intake and extending wheels orienter. With these designs, we did a team decision matrix where we split into five groups and scored each design based on a couple different criterias. The results of this are the designs with the RI3D Grabber were voted least. The 4 Bar Lead screw, (“Wheeled”) layered intake with a fixed bar orienter and the 971 arm with wheeled Intake and extending wheels orienter were pretty even in terms of votes. The Angled Elevator with 4 bar, layered intake was the clear winner. Our DVC voted and we ended up choosing the angled elevator with a 4 bar arm, a layered intake and a fixed bar orienter. On the mechanical side of the team, the machinists have been working on the belly pan and bumpers of the robot. The [...]