Northern New York!

This weekend was our first competition of the year! We did pretty well, and we’re happy with how far we, as a team, have come this year.  We took home the PTC Design Award, and were nominated for the Think Award. As well, we were  second place alliance captain.

However, there are a lot of improvements and changes we want to make to our robot,strategy, and autonomous. Overall, we won four out of five of our ranking matches and were second place alliance captain, but lost both of our finalist/championship matches. In my opinion, I think that our main problem was a lack of driver confidence, and interference from other robots on the field. Many robots at NNY were struggling to score. So, they mainly played defense, which was unfortunate for us.  Given that we have to be able to drive into the peg to score, the other team was able to easily block us and make us waste huge amounts of time trying to get around them. This rattled our drivers a lot, and I think they became pretty stressed throughout the matches, which certainly hurt us a bit. However, I was pretty proud at how they were able to battle through the day. Being able to observe our robot in a real competition experience showed us a lot of aspects of the robot that we could work on. Most of these observations weren’t problems with the robot itself (In a practice match that we did this week we emptied an entire dispenser and got a full triangle in two minutes, which is 230 points. If the IR beacon had been on the center peg, that would have been 280 points!), but instead were problems with how we went into the match.

In the car ride back we began to brainstorm a few ideas to make scoring easier and faster, even with other robots in our way. To start, we talked about how we could get rings off of the dispenser faster. We weren’t having problems getting them off once our arm was in the right place, but we had a little trouble getting the gripper aligned correctly. The best solution we came up with was to try an omni-drive. Doing so would allow us to drive in four directions, which would make lining up much easier . Another idea we had was to make the gripper extendable and move completely regardless of the drivetrain. This feature would allow allow us to reach over defensive bots, take rings off with more finesse and ease, and score quicker by not having to go onto the wood for the side pegs, and by allowing us to smoothly slide the rings on and off. As a complement to this idea, we also wanted to allow our gripper to rotate up and down and left to right. Doing so would allow the driver to be less accurate when aligning with the pegs, which would waste less time.

All of these changes reflect around our decision to change our strategy. At NNY most of our problems stemmed from how we moved around on the field and interacted with other robots. As navigating the field was so challenging, we decided to base our new strategy around moving as minimally as possible. Both the omnidrive and the extending gripper would allow us to stay almost in place.

This week, we began to prototype both the omnidrive and the extending gripper. The omnidrive is being prototyped on a completely new squarebot, which we will also use for driver practice to simulate a defensive bot. The extending gripper is using two prefabricated sliders to accomplish the horizontal movement.

Our next competition is in a week, and is Bluebell PA. This isn’t a lot of time, so we decided to use this week primarily for driver practice while we prototype our new ideas. We’re looking forward to Bluebell though, and hope we do well!

Matt Jones 9/8/12 Journal: Kick-off- talk about the different strategies

Today there was much excitement as we piled into the car heading for the 2012-13 FTC season kick-off. We had been speculating about different aspects of the game, and there had been several mentions of a “water game”. I don’t think anyone was expecting a game like Ring It Up.

The idea of going to kickoff today was to only focus on discussing strategy rather than design, however, when I saw the game board and animation, I couldn’t help but start thinking of various mechanisms to perform certain tasks. The few I thought plausible, I wrote down before forcing myself to stop thinking design in favor of thinking strategy, as was today’s plan.

We continued thinking and talking about strategies on the car ride home, on the way to a group meeting. There, we created a few spreadsheets to help with this. One listed all possible methods of scoring points and rated each one in a few criteria. After this was established, we tried to determine the best possible strategy, with the help of another spreadsheet. One strategy, suggested as a joke (I hope), was to make our robot consist of little more than an NXT and a motor, to make it easy for our alliance partner to pick us up during end game.

We eventually decided that we were going to score using rings. We also decided that, for some of the design of this year’s robot, we could take inspiration from pieces of last year’s robot. Using the same drive train, as it is very effective as is, will save a lot of time in the designing and building process, and the parallelogram lift is perhaps one of the most sturdy and reliable lifting mechanisms in UDRI history.

I certainly hope that this year will be better than last. I would love for our team to qualify for the world championship in St. Louis this year, but for now, my short term goal is to have the robot prepared so that we can perform well in the Northern New York competition.