Day 4: Field Construction, Whole Team Meeting

Field Construction

The field construction team made huge progress today.  A large group of students worked hard all day to complete both the minibot pole and one grid of scoring pegs.

Team members assemble the scoring pegs.

Team members assemble the minibot pole.

The completed scoring grid.

Whole-Team Meeting

We had a whole-team meeting at the lab today.  We discussed the progress thus far in the season and decided on distinct mechanism groups that will work on prototyping and designing each mechanism.  The slides are shown below.

Mechanism #0: Drivebase
Mechanism #1: Elevator/Arm to lift tubes to scoring height
Mechanism #2: Tube Grabber
Mechanism #3: Minibot

Design

The design team did not work very much today.  After the whole team meeting and the field was completed, we met to discuss the benefits of elevators and arms for mechanism 1.  Although no decision was made, the group seems to be leaning towards elevators for several reasons.

• We are very familiar with elevator design.
• Elevators can be extremely fast
• Precise height positioning is easier with elevators.

Here is a video of our 2007 robot and its clone, team 968, and their elevators.  Although our grabbers for this year may very drastically from their grabbers, the video gives a sense for how fast these elevators can move.  The elevators are able to easily move to any position in less than a second where most arms would take more time to raise a game piece.