Infinite Recharge: A New Game
Help us AndyMark, you’re our only hope!
Last week we were introduced to FIRST Robotics Competition: Infinite Recharge. We decided to first narrow down our strategy to three main things, being able to hit the high goal, climb, and stay under 27 inches for the trench run. After finalizing these main goals, we focused our energy on diving into different ways of accomplishing each task.
For climbing and shooting, we borrowed ideas from Ri3D, Robot in 3 Days, and other industrial options to raise and lower a hook to grab the Generator Switch. Since we can’t use the Force to score we started to look at shooter designs from our team’s highly successful 2016’s Stronghold robot, and other similar designs. Another example we’ve examined is the 2012 Rebound Rumble robot which used a flywheel type shooter, either hooded or dual flywheel.
To move our robot around the field we settled on the Millenium Falcon of drive systems, the rugged and reliable “West Coast” Drive, a 6 wheel drop center design.
Climbing had its own challenges since we imposed the 27 inch height limit. We looked at an articulating arm similar to a scissor lift as well as a telescoping arm with a push-pull chain from Germany to raise the lifting arm and lift the robot on the switch. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
The start of week two we found ourselves on the frozen plains of Hoth as our first snowstorm hit Washington forcing us to cancel a meeting due to snow concerns and a lack of Tauntauns. We were able to meet later in the week where we started to prototype our designs on CAD as our first parts started to come in the mail for the real world prototypes next week.
Stay tuned!