2023 Build Blog Week One
After a successful last season, Iron Claw Robotics is charged up for the 2023 Charged Up build season! On Saturday, January 7th, the team kicked off the season with much anticipation. The 2023 game is a pick-and-place game with two game pieces, cubes, and cones that robots must deposit on poles and steps. The endgame is a balancing ramp, similar to Rebound Rumble, but somewhat more manageable due to the two pivot points. Top-down view of the control systems components on the belly pan After devising game strategies and brainstorming the capabilities of our robot, power outages cut our first week short across Los Gatos, with a fallen tree cutting off power to Los Gatos High School for three days. This severely altered our schedule, pushing back the finalization of the prototype designs. Once we came back to school, we finished brainstorming designs and selected seven subsystems to prototype over the course of the week. We broke up the subsystems into three categories: arms, orienters, and grabbers. We are working on creating CADs for each arm, and the orienters and grabbers have been laser cut and are being tested. In terms of the drivetrain, the team selected to go with a swerve as we concluded it will give the team an edge in playing the Charged [...]