saarapiplani

Our team competed at East Bay Regional, a week six comp with 12 pre-qualified teams, including 254 Cheesy Poofs, 1678 Citrus Circuits, 5940 BREAD, 581 Blazing Bulldogs, 114 Eaglestrike, and more. In the days before, the team worked hard to maximize every ounce of ability our robot offered. After swapping the intake and several other hardware revisions, our software team was hard at work perfecting distance shooting. The Monday before competition, our robot, Vivace, shot consistently from the podium, scoring fifty times in a row. We then tuned our auto routines, focusing on our 5-piece and 3-piece routines. After running through them consistently, the team packed up and was ready to go.  During Friday’s practice sessions, we achieved many successful runs of our 5-piece, and used the 3-piece consistently-save for a mishap with placement. We maximized the potential of our drivetrain by increasing the current draw, which dramatically increased our speed. Shooting from distance worked well. Although one of the intake rollers broke, and a polycarb side piece cracked on the shooter, our pit crew swapped them out efficiently. By the end of the day, we were ready for qualification matches. On Saturday, we truly saw our hard work paying off, doing extremely well in qualifications. The only major issues we encountered were with the autonomous routines. The [...]

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 [...]

Week 5 is a busy one for team Iron Claw as we prepare for our upcoming competition. Our CADers have been working day-in-and-out, finalizing the designs of the intake, shooter, and arm. Last week, we decided to change the intake from over the bumper to under the bumper to provide adequate space for an object detection camera, as well as to make sure the intake is as robust as possible. With the addition of our under-the-bumper intake, we eliminated one degree of freedom from our robot. Additionally, we began assembling our prototype, and tested intaking as well as centering as it goes into the shooter. With the new intake, we tested out two centering mechanisms. The first was a set of polycarbonate plates that were bent to create ramps between the rollers. In our testing, we tried several types of surfaces including smooth polycarbonate, sanded polycarbonate, velcro loop, and masking tape. While sanded polycarbonate showed potential, we decided that none of the materials were successful enough as the note jammed on the side. Due to the failure of the plates, we decided to experiment with a pair of passive wheels that would direct the game piece toward our shooter. This seemed to work better, but we are transitioning to a powered wheel solution for the final design, using [...]

After our most successful season yet, Iron Claw Robotics is feeling upbeat and ready for the 2024 Crescendo Build Season! On Saturday, January 6th, our team met over winter break for our annual kickoff day to watch the game release. This year’s 2024 game consists of a ring-shaped game piece called a note, which can be deposited into three field elements: the amp, speaker, and trap. Although the endgame is not a time constrained section, robots can choose to climb on a chain with other robots or score in traps. Over the weekend, the team focused on strategy, dividing into five groups to discuss the best ways to maximize points and create potential auto paths during matches. On Sunday, after the groups presented their strategies to the class followed by a team discussion, the DVC (Decision Voting Council) voted on our robot functional requirements. These requirements dictate our strategy and what the robot will or will not do, playing a crucial role in our design using specific metrics to follow. Devising a detailed plan for strategy is our first important step to ensure our robot’s success. Throughout the week, we spent several meetings split into five groups to research various designs that uphold our functional requirements and team goals. After designs were presented, the DVC filtered twenty six [...]

Team Iron Claw 972 is already one step ahead of the Crescendo game: our practice field is almost complete and ready to go. Thanks to the hard work from mentors Art Chan and Harrison Van Der Walt, having a practice field will not only be important for driver practice, but also for analyzing the accuracy of prototypes and designs when interacting with the field elements. Additionally, our mentor, Aaron Payne, has provided us with a large space in the wood shop to hold the practice field.             We had four out of the five practice field elements made just within the first 10 hours of Crescendo being published, including the speaker and subwoofer, the amp, and the source.  We are also planning to build the stage field element before the end of build season, but are currently waiting on the trap to arrive from Andymark on January 15th, as well as a vendor to sell us Trusses. All other parts of the stage are planned to be cut out using a CNC router, making the process of assembling the field elements a lot faster than the objects that were cut by hand. We look forward to observing how the creation of our field this early in the season will influence how we design [...]