Well, Week 2 of the Build Season has come and gone, and the team is making enormous progress on the robot, which is very much a “Frankenbot” at the moment! You may rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings (Mary Shelley); the enterprise being the construction of the robot.
The chassis subsystem has been working hard on creating the base and drive train of the robot, and figuring out where in the world the manipulators are going to mount.
Each manipulator subsystem has been working hard on their specific devices, building all kinds of prototypes and testing them out.
And the electronics subsystem is way ahead using last year’s robot to test code and work more on vision processing.
The team looks forward to finishing the first iteration of the robot and starting driver practice within the next week: “How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by tools and parts! Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have partially made a vessel and am occupied in collecting my drivers; those whom I have already engaged appear to be people on whom I can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless gracious professionalism” (Mary Shelley).