Our shop has been full of busy bees in the first two weeks of the 2020 build season! Rookies and veterans alike are racing to get their prototypes started with hopes of their designs making the final cut. However, in addition to our build subteam’s advancements, programming has begun integrating with the prospective mechanism ideas.
Before our subteams could begin working on prototypes, the strategy group had to finalize its plans for the 2020 season. After constantly referring back to weighted objective tables and taking several votes on any serious discrepancies between mechanisms to include, we ended up settling on a set of tasks that our team felt was both high-scoring and feasible.
This week has been one of repeated trial and error for our programmers. So far, our biggest challenge has been improving vision to a point where our robot can recognize targets from far away. In the past, our vision code has been a constant point of contention. This year, students are using the programming from last season’s vision as a starting point, hoping to make our future designs more reliable, efficient, and effective. Others are implementing a color-sensing system for manipulation of the control panel, something that our team hopes to do in competition. Towards the end of the week, we were able to successfully discern colors from one another through code, something that will be beneficial for both rotation and position control. Lastly, the subteam got to work on an LED message relay system that would indicate the status of Miss Daisy to the drive team. This should be completed within the next few weeks, and is vital for our robot’s success.
Within the robot design/build subteam, prototypes are being designed, iterated, and tested at astonishing rates. At the moment, the team has two solid shooter designs that they are testing out, all of which are backed by a small group of dedicated students. But the hard work doesn’t stop there–possible hanging mechanisms were also a hot topic over the course of the past week. Our strategy team deemed hanging an extremely important task, so we’ve made sure to allocate plenty of resources to its success.
As a whole, our robot is slowly coming to fruition. All of the subteams are making headway–media is putting together videos for later in the season, PR is drafting award submissions and programming is making strides with each passing day. Slowly but surely, the team is working as one cohesive unit to get the job done, and the reward is progress sweeter than honey.
