2020-2021

Due to COVID-19, the season was fully online. We were unfortunately unable to build our robot design, but we still learned a lot about design principles and had a ton of fun with the new Game Design Challenge!

MEET OUR ROBOT!

This is our design robot for the fully online season. This season's game was almost the same as 2019-2020 due to the cancellation of the previous season.

This design represents a significant step up in design compared to previous years for our team. The robot was designed completely in CAD, with a strong focus on manufacturability, simplicity, and reliability. We took lessons learned about the game from 2020 into account in the design which led to a significant redesign of core subsystems.

The subsystems included:

  • A central spinning ball indexer ("spindexer") that can hold up to 5 Power Cells. This allows all 5 power cells to be loaded into the shooter in less than a second.

  • A full-width, "touch it own it" intake. Instead of centering the power cells like our 2020 robot, this intake is focused on picking the power cells up as fast as possible. We learned in 2020 how easy it was to drive over power cells, and this was designed to mitigate that.

  • A turreted flywheel shooter mounted above the spindexer. The horizontal flywheel and adjustable hood of the shooter are designed to give the ball backspin and control the shot with precision. The turret feature allows the robot to aim far faster and shoot from more positions.

  • Custom-built west coast drive, using a 6 wheel drivebase and gearboxes optimized for the short sprints that are required for this game.

FIRST SHIPWRECK GAME DESIGN

This year, FIRST came out with a new fully online game design challenge. We created a mock FIRST game including a CAD of a field and game manual. Our game included two teams consisting of 3 robots each working together to escape a sinking ship. Ways to earn points include...

  • bailing "water" (a game piece) from the ship

  • anchoring the ship by hooking chain pieces together

  • climbing in the lifeboats at the end of the game

In the autonomous start to the game (the first 15 seconds), all successful bailing or hanging chain pieces counts as double points.

During the endgame (the last 30 seconds of the match) teams attempt to climb into a "lifeboat" using a bar that spans across the top of the rectangular box.

For this game, our team won the Engineering Design Award, our team's first award in over a decade!

Team Leadership

Team Captains: Alex Echols

Build Captains: Ben Tarr & Eli Holst

Competition Captains: Donise Griffin & Devin McArdle-Larrow