Roxanna Abdollahi – Iron Claw Robotics

Build Season Week 3 Blog

By Roxanna Abdollahi|2025-01-29T17:12:27-08:00January 29th, 2025|

Following a restful MLK long weekend, we continued with data testing, creating many new prototypes, and making some important decisions. On Tuesday, our Design Voting Council (DVC) voted on different orientations of the elevator. They settled on an elevator oriented on its side, angled at 4 degrees, due to its benefit of taking up less space. We also started planning which awards we are going to pursue, working on our tech binder, and ordering apparel. We ended the day with our weekly stand-up presentation. Throughout the rest of the week, we continued prototyping various mechanisms for deep climb, coral intake, and our autonomous routine. During this time, we decided to test an offset bicep climb to see if it would be possible to place the mechanism on the side of our robot. Through many trials, we observed that the bicep arm with an offset often slipped off the cage. In parallel with the deep cage climb and autonomous path testing, our team has started testing intake from every orientation. Depositing the coral into the trough (L1) has met our functional requirement of 95% or greater for scoring L1. We also tested stacking coral in the trough to maximize our earned points. [...]

Build Season Week 2 Blog

By Roxanna Abdollahi|2025-01-29T17:13:07-08:00January 24th, 2025|

This past week has been extremely productive for our team, with significant progress across various areas. On the prototyping side, we continued working on the intake, outtake, and our deep cage climb. We have been avidly testing ways to pick up coral from every orientation on the ground and trying various indexers to re-orient the coral into a vertical position so our robot can score it in the trough (L1). Over the weekend, we assembled and tested our bicep climb mechanism. We made solid improvements to the lever tube, switching to 4 ¼” plates for version 2, enhancing its strength. We added some extra weights to imitate a robot's realistic weight. We’re also looking into ways to enhance alignment and efficiency, including pocketing and experimenting with alternative lever materials. We also developed a second version of the outtake to enhance its functionality. We’ve completed the drivetrain assembly and the control systems board. Additionally, we installed the climbing cages on the practice field, where we had the opportunity to host Team 971 on Thursday who were doing some auto-testing on their dev robot. We also continued testing on our Alphabot, practicing cycle times and how quickly our robot can score coral on [...]

Build Season Week 1 Blog

By Roxanna Abdollahi|2025-01-29T15:11:31-08:00January 11th, 2025|

After exciting anticipation for the game reveal over winter break, we gathered to watch FIRST’s live stream. We then 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 and 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, a [...]

Operations of Competition Selection

By Roxanna Abdollahi|2025-01-29T15:13:09-08:00November 20th, 2024|

The new year means setting up for success, including organizing our Pit, managing operations, and handling new material shipments. Our shop manager, Ellery Han, has been cleaning the Pit and delegating tasks to sort last year's parts, screws, and miscellaneous items. A well-organized Pit is crucial for efficiency. With packages arriving nonstop, we order early to avoid delays and ensure we have everything needed for the Fall and Build Seasons. Students help sort and take inventory, ensuring each subteam knows what materials are available for their projects. The operations subteam, in which all members are required to contribute at least 4 hours of admin tasks and additional upkeep work, is led by our new operations director, Claire Mayder. She’s been training new students and leads, applying for grants, and more. Our new communications lead, Jahnvi Bheemarasetti, assists Claire by training first-year students on the website and managing blog uploads. Our team fundraises the majority of its money in the Fall Season, this includes receiving money from sponsors such as the Wild Cat Foundation–our school foundation that raises money for school-related activities. Big thanks to them as well as all of our other sponsors! We’ve also had significant work done in [...]

2024 Fall Season Vision Blog

By Roxanna Abdollahi|2025-01-29T15:13:52-08:00November 19th, 2024|

This is the third year we have worked on the vision project. In the 2022-2023 season, we started the project and wrote code for pose estimation using April Tags. In 2023-2024, we mostly focused on improving the accuracy of our pose estimation, but we also started working on object detection. Our pose estimation was accurate enough to shoot into the speaker by the competition, but our object detection was not functional enough to use the competition. This year, we are mostly focusing on object detection. The first step is imaging the Jetson Orin Nano that we plan to use since we currently need help finding the one we used last year. We encountered several problems imaging it and installing all of the necessary libraries, but we eventually finished. Our code runs but gets about 7 or 8 frames per second. We are currently trying to improve our framerate, and then we plan to mount a camera on our test robot to create and tune an algorithm to help the driver intake a game piece. We are also training a practice model. Since FIRST released that there will be two different game pieces next year, we decided to use cones and cubes [...]

2024 Build Blog Week Seven

By Roxanna Abdollahi|2024-02-26T22:58:21-08:00February 26th, 2024|

As February comes to a close, students have been hard at work during their break. Week seven has led our robot to progress nicely. All of our sub teams have been working hard to prepare for our first competition of the year, Silicon Valley Regional. This week, the arm, shooter, and intake have been mounted and wired onto our robot. Our subsystems were assembled separately and, when done, mounted on the drivetrain. We designed around serviceability and ease of understanding in preparation for competition. All power wires were labeled and routed separately from CAN and sensors for clarity in robot inspections, debugging, and replacing of parts. Wire connectors and extensions, for example, are all centralized in certain accessible locations to avoid having to access our protected upside-down control system board. The programming team has been successful in identifying the initial x and y velocities for shooting while moving (SWM). We can make various test cases, and make them work. We are now working on successfully integrating drivetrain into the test cases by setting drivetrain velocities and attempting to shoot at the actual pose of the speaker. The Vision team has been increasing the accuracy of our computer assisted game piece acquisition. This includes training better machine learning models and fixing the distortion of the camera. We have also [...]