samk
Hey all, we have had a busy couple of weeks! FIRST has announced the 2012 robotics challenge, this years game is called Rebound Rumble. For the past two weeks or so the team has been super busy prototyping and designing on new robot! We built the major field items, such as the hoops and bridge, and are all ready for a robot to drive on them. Speaking of robots, the build team built a c-base frame for the programmers to test all of the electronics on. The entire team is still working on designs for a ball manipulator, hopefully we will have a final design chosen by Sunday at the latest. Looking ahead we are building the frame this week ( bolt together this year, no welding) and finishing the cad of all the designs. We hope that we have a good season!
Ok, it has been a crazy past couple of days. We got our chassis in on Tuesday, and then our bearing blocks were made by Thursday. We have had to make some adjustments due to things bearing broken and out of square, but we plowed through and this past weekend the transmissions and all four wheels were mounted. And I am glad to say that all four wheels touch the ground at the same time (what a relief!). We also got the battery mount, mounted. On our to do list, our arm, a double jointed one, is put into solidworks and we ordered the materials for it today. We will hopefully get those in soon and go into full steam ahead for machining the arm parts. Our claw is almost completed in solidworks, and the parts for it have also been ordered. The minibot is going well, it goes up the pole in around two seconds, and the minibot deployment system is being worked on now. All in all, everything is going well, and we will have a driving robot soon!
The build team has been busy with prototyping . We have two different designs for a arm, a double jointed or a high pivot telescoping. We also have several different manipulators being prototyped, we have two standard claws, and then one with a built in wrist. Besides the claws, there is a wheel design being made. Our chassis has been modeled in SolidWorks, and we shipped it off to the welder. It should get back to us tomorrow (hopefully), and we will then mount everything onto it. We decided on using the AndyMark toughbox for our gearbox. We are using dual 8″ AndyMark sticky wheels in the front, and then the dual 8″ Andymark omni wheels in the back. We hope to get the final design for both the manipulator and the arm decided on tomorrow, we will then put those into solidworks and build the final version. The minibot is being prototyped on, and we haven’t made a decision on how to deploy it yet. We hope to be done by the end of week four, to give us plenty of time to drive and test.
The FIRST® Robotics Competition is a high-school robotics competition that inspires students to pursue engineering and teaches them about the rewards and challenges of working together under pressure.
