FRC 2017 Game Bot (2021 Practice)

Robot Design Concept

Designed by new FRC CAD members during the 2021 FRC off-season, this robot served as a testing ground for designing and integrating an FRC file. 

As the focus was on building basic skills rather than functionality, members were allowed to try designing mechanisms anyway they wished, even if the plan was rather ambitious. 

The robot was designed to have a west coast drivebase with a shifting gearbox. A west coast drivebase is the simplest effective drivebase for the team to design from scratch. In order to further challenge themselves, they added a gearbox which potentially allows for the drivebase to either accelerate more effectively (by shifting gears) and to use a lower gear to increase the torque of the drivebase in a potential pushing match.

As this is a robot meant for the 2017 FRC Game, Steamworks, the primary game object, Fuel is a game object that is meant to be shot. (To reduce the scope of the project, the secondary game object of gears was ignored.) The robot features a very wide through bumper intake that brings balls high up into the robot to drop balls into the large moving floor indexer. 

Robot Design Learnings

Unfortunately this design was never fully completed nor was there a build attempt. However, looking at the file some design features stand out.

What Worked Well

Despite being designed by new FRC members, 4817 still used this as an opportunity to try to design some more uncommon mechanisms to expand the design team's repertoire.

The drivebase's gearbox was successfully designed to include a pneumatic shifter and dog gears to allow for the drivebase to have multiple torques.