Today, the team tested an advanced Lidar Sensor solution. Extensive testing was performed (approx 30 min).

by Dan Ngo '17

Design Review

The highlight of the day was the design review, during which the team congregated to discuss and possibly finalize the strategy and conceptual robot design thus far. The team decided that its overall strategy would be aimed at being able to first self score all three balls in autonomous. This removes any risk of relying on teammates during this valuable portion of the match. Subsequently, in teleoperated mode, general scoring would be prioritized. Assisting, while useful for qualification points, will likely only become significant in elimination matches.

Regardless of strategy, we agreed that the robot should be able to perform all the tasks in the game (shooting, passing, catching, etc.). We determined that a flywheel shooter aligns with these goals and packages nicely in the robot's envelope. Additionally, to be able to score all three balls in autonomous, the team would first need a mechanism to hold and feed them into the shooter. This is currently being prototyped.

Programming

Team members continued work on integration of the ultrasonic sensor. We also worked on making programs to remotely access feedback from the robot, to ease autonomous testing. We also installed new, smaller, joysticks on the control board. These joysticks use hall effect sensors instead of potentiometers for more reliable and precise control.

Manufacturing

Today, groups worked on machining parts for the gearbox, the ongoing arm prototype, and started the feeding mechanism prototype.

Action Items

• Continue intake prototype
• More testing and coding
• Work on the feeding mechanism prototype

by Trevor Salom '17

Programming

Today, the programmers worked on testing a VEX ultrasonic sensor to see whether the robot could use it to gauge its distance from the wall of the field. The VEX sensor was used as a temporary stand-in while the programming team awaits the arrival of the competition sensors.

In addition, they continued working on applications to graph the feedback sent by the robot.

Design

Today, we continued the design of the robot and continued detailing the main intake, the shooter wheel and the actuating hood. The shooter is powered by two mini CIM motors with power transmission through small GT2 timing belts. The front intake has a 550 motor mounted on the end of the arm with a two-stage belt reduction aimed to give a roller surface speed around 15 ft/sec. This speed was determined by estimating the average robot speed while intaking (10 ft/s) and determining the amount of time we hope for an intake to take.

Furthermore, we finalized the design of the baseplate and continued work on the design of a drill holder.

Manufacturing

Today, we began making the outer bearing housings. A large order of material arrived today from our aluminum supplier. The aluminum plate for the robot bellypan was dropped off at sponsor BAE systems for waterjet cutting. We expect the baseplate to be cut on Monday.

Furthermore, a number of team members cut tread today. This tread will be used on practice wheels for existing robots and may eventually be placed on the competition robot (once its wheels are made).

Roller Intake Prototype

Work was also started on building a more refined version of the roller intake prototype. The intake will be raised and lowered by pistons, and will be based on a CAD drawing of the final design.

Action Items

• Finalize Robot Design and CAD under Andrew Torrance and Mani Gnanasivam
• Refine Intake Prototype under Dan Judnick
• Programming and related testing with Brandon or Stephen
• Help out the Media Team under Kevin or Maxwell
• Ask a leader or mentor or request access following the instructions on the whiteboard to see what other tasks are listed on the Trello.

In honor of our first day of rest of the season, here's a GIF of the season's latest dance craze.

Today, we didn't meet at the lab. Some team members worked on CAD on their own.

by Christian and Michael Simeon

Catcher Prototype

Today, students lined the catching prototype with VEX field flooring tiles to help keep balls in the catcher by preventing them from bouncing off the PVC pipes and rope. Students also improved on the attached intake prototype. Additionally, they attached gyroscopes and encoders to allow the prototype to better recognize angles and ultimately better function. Students have begun testing for those encoders and gyroscopes added to the drive base. Sending data from the encoders and gyroscopes to a web browser with graphs and statistics on the robot will help with fine tuning the prototype.

The Shooter Prototype

An elevator system with metal bars and PVC has been added so that balls can be more consistently fed into the shooter. Additionally, the arch on the top of the shooter prototype has been modified. Later, metal and PVC were removed and replaced with a frisbee and cables.

CAD

Today the people working on CAD continued working on drive base. They mirrored the gear box for the other side of the robot and added it to the drive base CAD. They also added the electronics and other necessary components. Finally, they also made part drawings for spacers in the gear box.

Team members also continued thinking about packaging options for the superstructure. We have decided on having three pivoting arms for the robot's two intakes and catching hood. All arms will be piston-actuated and are designed to fit within the 20" extension rule. The intakes are bent to allow for rollers to contact balls as the robot spins to grab a ball. With straight bar intakes, the bars could push balls out of the way of the intakes.

We also discussed mechanisms for locking the hood in place during shots to prevent the balls from pushing against air pressure to reduce hood compression. Discussed mechanisms included an over-center piston linkage and a locking piston mechanism. We will likely move forward with the locking piston mechanism.

Miscellaneous

Students and mentors worked on the lathe to create standoffs for the gear box. Additionally, work continued on submissions for the Entrepreneurship, Chairman's, and Media and Technology Innovation Awards.

Action Items

• Finalize entire drive train design and CAD with mentors to prepare for ordering the baseplate
• Finalize catcher prototype with Abhi
• Finalize control board design with Brandon Gonzalez, Chris Sides, and Abhi Kumar
• Work on pit display with Travis
• Brainstorm ideas for publicity releases for team social media sites for releases throughout the build season: for Jeremy, but he will not be there
• Create and maintain a Gantt chart for Mani
• Help Mani clean up
• Ask a leader for other tasks on the Trello

Catcher & Intake Prototype

Today, several team members integrated the intake and catcher prototypes with the 2013 practice robot drive base to create a prototype robot that can catch and intake the balls. They removed the catcher arms from the back and front of the drive base and placed the intake in the back of the drive base. Additional planks of wood were attached to the walls of the intake to increase the compression on the ball while from the intake.

Several students began working on a new intake roller prototype. This new mechanism uses 1.5" neoprene rubber rollers instead of the current 3.5" blue bane's bots wheels that are currently being used.

Shooter Prototype

A group of team members worked on further tuning the shooter prototype. They also performed several tests using different shooting angles and different distances from the goal in order to determine the optimum shooting distance.

Additionally, we began to improve the shooter prototype by adding reinforcements to the base and machining a new hood.

Prototype Testing

The groups working on the shooter and the integrated catcher and intake prototype came together to test whether or not it is possible for us to shoot over the truss using the current design. The conclusion is that the design will work, but it needs further tuning to be consistent. This test was done by using a "dummy truss," also known as EJ.

The same group also tested whether or not it is possible for another robot to catch the ball as it is being thrown over the truss. The special constraint that we tested was whether or not the catching robot could start at the same position as the throwing robot and be able to drive fast enough to catch the ball. Although this robot has the same ratios as we are planning on using for the 2014 robot, it lacks a superstructure and is lighter, resulting in superior acceleration.

CAD

Work continued on the design of the drivebase for the robot. Right now the drive base is functionally identical to the previous year's drive base. The only major changes have been the mounting points for the superstructure, which have been moved closer to the bumper mount to allow for a superstructure wide enough to hold the large balls in this game.

The team also got together to design the look of the rest of the robot. They discussed how to integrate the two intakes, the shooter, and the catcher into the robot and the overall design of superstructure. Right now there is a rough idea of how the robot should look. Further detailing will be based on the results of prototyping.

Lab Improvements

Today, we also worked on installing better light fixtures over the metals fabrication area in the lab. This will improve the lighting of the area, which will also improve machine quality and safety.

Manufacturing

The center bearing housings for the drive base were finished and polished today. As a result the manufacture of additional parts will begin.

Action Items

• Continue testing shooter prototype
• Finish manufacturing new intake prototype
• Finish drive base CAD
• Send baseplate for manufacturing
• Continue designing rest of the robot
• Begin manufacturing parts for the drive base

by Jeffrey Kaufmann

New Flywheel Prototype

A team of students worked on the updated prototype of the flywheel shooter. The new prototype can shoot at an almost vertical angle, enabling the robot to toss the ball over the truss. It also allows for easier packing because its flywheel is smaller than that of the first prototype yet still retains the positives aspects of the original. Some problems occurred during the construction of the new wheel such as broken or splitting wood pieces delaying completion.

This piece had to be replaced. The team attached the curved piece of the flywheel that allows for an approximately 45 degree trajectory.

New Catcher Prototype

A group of students worked on fixing the second catcher prototype. This update will allow for a more mechanically robust device. The rope on the catcher and add a few metal pieces were overhauled today, resulting in a tighter, more stable and cleaner design.

After testing the new mechanism while driving the results were quite satisfactory. The great mobility of the drive granted the ability to quickly get underneath the ball and receive an almost perfect catch.

Programming

The programming team worked hard on the coding on day #6. Today they made it so that the robot can now serve HTML pages. Furthermore, they had to refactor some of the code. In conclusion, while they had to restructure the code, this change did not affect how the code behaved.

Organization of New Equipment

Recently, we received new equipment for the lab, such as soldering devices and other tools. Several students helped organize these new parts and categorized everything received into an Excel document, creating in effect an organized system of all the new equipment within a neat document.

Action Items

• Continue helping Abhi and Dan with catcher prototype and an add intake system.
• Continue helping Ahmed and Paul with shooter prototype improvements
• Continue testing
• Continue working on the drive base CAD with Andrew

Flywheel Shooter Prototype

Today, we continued work on a new flywheel shooter prototype. The team determined that smaller shooter wheels would make the shooter more packagable in the robot. We made some great progress and we should be able to complete it tomorrow.

Design

Work continued on the drive gearboxes today. Based on the results of the simulation discussed yesterday, we decided that we would move forward with 2 3 CIM motor gearboxes but would also design 2 CIM motor gearboxes that could be swapped in if necessary. Although this would reduce acceleration, it could lighten the robot by up to 8 lbs.Today, we added the Bimba pancake pistons to the two speed gearbox assembly. We are moving forward with the previously discussed ratios of 4.2:1, 19.6ft/s in high gear and 10.6:1, 7.6ft/s in low gear. The CAD is almost done and is only missing a few components.

Programming

Today the programmers continued work on the graphing system for the robot. They worked on getting a TCP/IP server running on the robot and working out the technicalities of using a browser to monitor the stream of data from the robot.

Action Items

Finish Gearbox CAD, begin finalizing Drive base CAD

Catcher Prototype

Today, we continued work on the catcher prototype, making it higher and wider so that it can better catch balls from all angles. Although the catcher is promising, its large size may be a problem when packaging mechanisms for the robot.

Catapult Prototype

The catapult prototype was finished today. The shooter is very smooth and can be easily reloaded in less than 5 seconds. It is consistent and accurate from up close (~2 ft from high goal) but mediocre from midway to the white zone. This shooter suffers from inconsistency in ball positioning within the catapult which could be improved with a better ball cradle.

Flywheel Shooter Prototype

The flywheel shooter has been the most successful thus far with accuracy, precision, range, and simplicity. Because of its success (especially in scoring all 3 balls in under 5 seconds), we took it apart to replace the large wheels with smaller wheels while narrowing it to maintain ball compression with the smaller wheels. We hope to test this tomorrow.

Programming

Today, the programming team worked to get the 2013 practice robot up and running to test the drivebase. Several problems were encountered along the way. First, they had an SDK error on the robot which took them a long time to fix - eventually a cRio reflash solved the problem. Second, there was a problem with the wiring on the robot so they weren't receiving any data from the TCP server. They eventually fixed the problem and now they are working on a way to graph the data from the robot in a quick and easily readable way.

Over the next few days they will also work on are prototyping some autonomous for the robot as we determined the autonomous is very important strategically.

Autonomous Strategy

We have determined that the autonomous period is critical to our success in Aerial Assist, allowing the robot to score up to 65 points. Because of this, we want our robot to be able to score 3 balls in under 5 seconds. The flywheel prototype is the most promising for meeting this objective.

Over the next few days, the programming team plans to start working on drivebase control loops for autonomous, using Overkill as a practice base.

Drivebase Design

Today, work began on the robot drivebase, taking heavy inspiration from last year's robot. The robot's 6WD drivebase is the same overall size (28" W x 27.75" L) with wheel wells that can accommodate up to 1.5" tread width. Today, we created a rough chassis in CAD and started work on the 2 speed drive gearbox.

The planned drive speeds are similar to last year (3 CIM motors per gearbox, 12:40 inital reduction, 15:48 low gear reduction, 28:38 high gear reduction, 3.5" wheel diameter, 19.6 ft/s & 7.7 ft/s theoretical speeds). Due to the tight clearance between the 40T gear and the dog, the outer diameter of the dog will need to be reduced somewhat. Overall, this is a very similar gearbox to last year.

To determine the acceleration performance of our planned ratios, we performed a simulation of the drivebase accelerating. We decided to optimize the robot for 10-15 foot sprints and found that the ratios worked well with these goals. Furthermore, we found that while the 6 CIM drivetrain could reach 10 or 15 feet 10-20% faster than the 4 motor drivetrain, it drew much more power and could lead to premature battery drain.

Action Items

• Test flywheel shooter prototype.
• Test intake prototype with Mani.
• Continue working on drive base and gearbox design with Nagy.
• Compare all 3 shooter prototypes and decide on which we want to use.
• Continue work on drive code and autonomous planning with Stephen and Brandon.

Autonomous Strategy

Today, we discussed scoring all three balls in autonomous. In autonomous, only the area directly in front of the low goal is guaranteed to be undefended. The strategy would involve starting with one ball in the robot, one in front and one behind. The robot would immediately drop an intake on each side of the robot and drive to the hot goal to score, dragging the balls with it. We also discovered that a banner sensor was able to pick up the reflective tape, meaning that the robot wouldn’t need to a camera to detect the hot zones.

We discussed whether it was more beneficial to shoot from afar or really close to the goal. Several team members proposed that shooting 2-4 feet away would be best since it would more than likely increase the robot’s accuracy. The fly wheel shooter was set up about 3-4 feet away from the goal and was able to successfully score

Catapult Prototype

A group today worked on a catapult prototype. A good amount of progress was made and it seems to be coming along well. The only things left to add are the rope, springs and hard stops.

Ball Catcher

Some of the students worked on a basic catcher prototype, making it from PVC pipe. They added a funnel to the top to increase the likelihood of the ball going in. It worked out well with some minor strengthening.

Programming

The programming team worked on a basic autonomous runner that uses threading. In essence, it allows for commands to be run while still allowing evaluation to occur. Also, in the event that a command should fail or timeout, the robot will skip the rest of the commands. One of the ideas that was brought up was separate compilation for the main code and autonomous routine to allow for quick changes to the autonomous without having to recompile the whole codebase.