third, second, FIRST!!!!!

Once again, all of our favorite robotics competition is about to start, and all of the teams are excited to receive this years unique challenge! Its FIRST Robotics. Every year, thousands of teams worldwide compete in this high school robotics competition.

...Atholton RAID
Last year was my final year at Atholton, so it was my final year competing on our HS FIRST team. But this year, I have come back as a team mentor! This evening we had our first meeting (no pun intended) and I had to catch up on a lot of information. Our club had nearly doubled in size from only 12 dedicated membors to 30! Everybody had already chosen their sub-teams, so we knew who would be focusing on electrical, design, programming, and hardware. On Friday we'll meet again, then Saturday is the kickoff. The whole club will gather and watch a live screencast of the presentation of this years game by famous inventor, Dean Kamen, and esteemed MIT professor, Woody Flowers.

...The Competition

This year, the game has been designed to make it much more interesting for spectators, such that there will hopefully be a non-technical audience to whom this can appeal! The game entails of teams of three robots, that face against each other. Each team has 2 goals on their side of the field in the corners. They can score 1 point by kicking a soccer ball into this goal. On the field, there are 12 soccer balls at a time. As they are scored, the human players must re-enter the balls onto the field through a ramp structure that is above the playing field. If you with to see more about the game, visit www.usfirst.org.

...Our Robot

Now just over a week into the 6 week competition, we have finalized the chassis design of our robot, all of the manipulators we'll be using, and have begun working on designs for the different manipulators. We plan on a long or short-range ball shooting mechanism, as well as a way to pull our robot up 20 inches off the ground using the tower that is built on the field. We are looking at linear pneumatic launchers, as well as potential rotational energy to launch the ball. We also will be using two camera's, one for ball viewing, and another for finding the target above the goals. This will help to keep the balls under control, and also to accurately measure distance from the robot to the goal. Our main objective with this is that we can have a "fire & forget" system. We will have a light on out driver station that will light up if the camera's see a ball and the target. If bot are seen, then the driver can just tap the trigger on our joystick, and the software will then move to get the ball into alignment with the target, compute its distance from the goal, and fire with accordingly. As far as our robot lifting mechanism, we are evaluating the feasibility of a scissor lift system that will pull up the robot. The final design concept that has been bouncing around is that of a system to pick up another robot, and carry it on top of us, as we lift ourself off the ground. This system would gain us an extra 3 bonus points at the end of the game, in addition to the 2 we get for pulling ourselves off the ground. I feel that if we can get this idea to come to fruition, it will most definitely be one of the top robots at the competition.