Today was the first event in which we got to see a handful of the other teams attending the Arizona regional. At one of the high schools in Phoenix, people set up a half field (half the long ways) for everyone to practice on. This was pretty much time to see what other teams came up with, and the different designs that were thought of and created. Surprisingly, there were not many robots with the same design, although many of the robots had mechanisms that we had previously designed and built, but found not to work as well. Overall though, it was a day to calibrate and tweak everything.
Shooter
Today, we did not focus too much on the shooter, as we knew it would be just fine, and that was confirmed by basic off field testing. Although we did add stuff to the shooter assembly, it was primarily for ball containment and the intake, and is more so for the whole intake assembly. Once we were able to get the intake working, we could further play around with the shooter, and saw that it was overall fairly consistent, although we do need to change the angle of the shot so we have a solid range of hitting the shot, rather than a range within the range of missing.
Most other teams had catapults that weren't operated by surgical tubing on the back though. Instead, most teams had pneumatic catapults or catapults actuated by motors. While most teams had this, only 842 was able to shoot and hit from 18 feet. There was only one other team that used elastics of any kind, and, while they had decent range, just needed to tune their shooting angle.
Intake
It was an interesting day in terms of playing around with the intake. While we mounted front of the catapult a little higher and had the tennis balls on top to try to hold the ball on the shooter, the ball could not be picked up at all, and was just being pushed against the front of the catapult and the tennis balls, as it was trying to compress the ball to less than 2/3 of the original diameter. This was originally solved by removing the tennis balls, but, without the tennis balls, the ball would slip off when the bot wasn't being driven, which was somewhat of a problem.
After talking to one of the other team's mentors, he helped us with a possible solution to it all. Since the distance between the ball and roller is what matters, we just moved the tennis balls back, so it would increase the distance from the roller to the surface of the catapult/increase that closest distance the ball has to travel through.
While it didn't keep the ball on perfectly, as it would sometimes pop off when the intake would be lowered, we figured out we just had to spin the intake while dropping it to keep the ball in the same spot, so it should be just fine and work how well we need it to.
In terms of other intakes, there were quite a few of the intakes similar to ours, but without the side rollers, so they would be a little inconsistent at times, as well as a couple claws and forklifts. In terms of claws, only 842 was effective, since they have sensors on their claw that allow them to immediately pick up a ball when it hits, and most of the other stuff took a while to pick up. The most interesting was by far a team that built a vacuum to pick up the ball. Once we got our intake working, we definitely had the best intake there, as the side rollers would prevent the ball from getting stuck on the side of the intake.
Drive Base
After fixing the intake, we finally got to drive the robot around, and, as expected, it worked pretty well overall, and did everything it needed to, other than being a little front heavy.
In terms of other teams designs, the drive bases were mostly square or narrow, and not really many wide bases. Also, all were tank drive with either Kit of Parts wheels or mecanum wheels.
Overall, today was the first day to look at the strategy that may be applied by some teams. While it doesn't really affect the engineering design process now, it helps with verifying the strategy decided upon in the conceptual design process. From what was seen, an effective strategy was just having one robot stay in one position, and other robots come to feed the balls, so the shots would never be missed and two ball cycles would be made every 15-20 seconds or so. Also, it appeared extremely hard to catch a ball, even while not being defended, so that may be something we don't spend as much time on.
Approximate times of working: 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM
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