The 2010 competition was titled Breakaway®. In Breakaway, two teams of three robots each compete on a three section field to score soccer balls into goals on either end of the field. The three sections were divided by 1 foot tall bumps that could be crossed either by climbing over the bump or passing through tunnels under the towers. The towers were tall structures on which robots could hang themselves for extra points at the end of the match.
For our 2010 season, Breakaway, we built Longshot. Longshot is a four-wheel drive robot, with two omni wheels in the back and two sticky wheels in the front. It was designed to go in the tunnels and it succeeded in doing so. For our manipulator we made a spring/pneumatic combo kicker. The way it worked was, the pneumatic would pull back the kicker, creating spring tension, into a gate latch. It would then create a vacuum in the front chamber and pressurize the back of the pneumatic cylinder. We then released the gate latch and we could kick the ball around 50 feet. On the robot we used, four pneumatic tanks, two toughbox transmissions, one compressor, and two pneumatic cylinders.
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.
