FRC 2022 Game Bot Design B

The robot also features a combination of a telescoping lift and a pivot arm in order to traverse the Rungs in the Truss structure.

Robot Design Learnings

This robot would go on to win the Quality Award at the Arizona Valley Regional, making it one of the best designed robot's in Team 4817's history.  

What Worked Well

This robot was very well integrated across mechanisms. Given it was more or less designed by a single member this is to be expected when the designer has enough experience. They can visualize the entire robot in their head and think through every single component to ensure a seamless integration.

Post completing the CAD for this robot, the robot built was a near exact 1:1 copy of the CAD, without any CAD revisions needed for the primary functionality of the robot, (shooting Cargo). This gave the team enough time to powder coat the robot in red and black per the CAD file.  

The Cargo moved efficiently through the robot, with the intake, filter, indexer, and flywheel all functioning as intended. 

The telescoping section of the climber was able to successfully bring the robot to a Mid Rung climb. 

What Could Be Improved

The flip side of having a single designer CAD the entire robot is that it took significantly longer to complete. In contrast, Team 4817's Competition Design A Robot  was designed by a team of less experienced designers, yet the CAD was completed much quicker. This longer design time is not ideal even though very few to no revisions to the CAD was required after the build started for a fully functioning robot. A few weak points  for the robot were identified. However, there was simply not enough time to modify the robot and it was sent as is to the competition. (The distinction lies in that Design B had no critical errors, meaning that once the build started, the robot could be finish following the CAD exactly, despite its flaws. Design A, made by less experienced members, started its build earlier as the the CAD was "finished" earlier. However, critical flaws were discovered and revised during the build. These are 2 different approaches with different positives and negatives for each.)

While the flywheel was intentionally designed to shoot Cargo into the Upper Hub when the robot was parked right up against the Fenders, this turned out to be a negative. The original intention was to increase the accuracy of shots without using complicated field location tracking code. The solution was to have the robot always be parked beside the Fenders for shooting so that the distance from the Upper Hub would be known. However, this limitation in where on the field the robot could shoot made it particularly susceptible to defence tactics from opposing alliance robots. 

The pivot arm of the robot's climber was powered by pneumatics. These pneumatics proved to be unreliable, stopping the robot from being able to traverse the Rungs in the Truss structure, limiting the points the robot could score in the end game. 

A rather minor problem was that dust seemed to catch more easily in the Swerve X modules from West Coast Products compared to the MK3 modules from Swerve Drive Specialities found in Reference 12. Moving forward, the team decided to only buy swerve modules from Swerve Drive Specialities, as at the time they delivered the best swerve modules in the team's opinion. 

Rapid React Robot Comparisons

To see a simpler but just as effective robot design, refer to Ref 12.