Power was out on Sunday from some crazy wind overnight, so we started the day in a dark room.
The What's (Cont'd)
Sunday started off with a discussion of our last remaining functional requirements. The bulk of the discussion was about which game pieces we wanted to grab from which parts of the field. The unfilled boxes in this matrix took the longest to decide on. Our final answers and reasoning for each were: |
Shelf Cubes - Can easily be dropped on the ground to become ground cubes. The rolling and bouncing characteristics aren't too scary.
Verdict: ✗
Upright Shelf Cones - This will be our "primary cycle." We will do this for most of every match, unless things are going very wrong.
Verdict: ✓
Upright Ground Cones - Our preferred autonomous requires us to score some cones from the ground onto the high nodes, which makes this a requirement.
Verdict: ✓
Tipped Ground Cones - The hard one. Tipped cones will only be on the ground in regular play if someone has made a mistake in their game piece handling. At lower levels of play, handling these will be less critical. At higher levels of play, they won't be available as often. That said, If they appear we don't want to leave them to be scored against us.
Verdict: Hybrid node only.
The final requirements list by the end of Sunday looks like this:
Verdict: ✗
Upright Shelf Cones - This will be our "primary cycle." We will do this for most of every match, unless things are going very wrong.
Verdict: ✓
Upright Ground Cones - Our preferred autonomous requires us to score some cones from the ground onto the high nodes, which makes this a requirement.
Verdict: ✓
Tipped Ground Cones - The hard one. Tipped cones will only be on the ground in regular play if someone has made a mistake in their game piece handling. At lower levels of play, handling these will be less critical. At higher levels of play, they won't be available as often. That said, If they appear we don't want to leave them to be scored against us.
Verdict: Hybrid node only.
The final requirements list by the end of Sunday looks like this:
The How's
Now that we know what we need to accomplish, it's time to start brainstorming. Groups were mixed again and then started sketching robots. Here are all of today's sketches.
A leading design after all of the sketching is a single-stage extension mounted on a high pivot point on the robot. We think we can get the full height of the robot down to 26" - similar to last year's robot without the climber.
Prototyping Groups
From this point we brake into prototyping groups and start making plans. Each group has a specific objective, as outlined below: