Welcome back, everyone!
Hello again everyone! Today I’ll be following up Sunday’s kickoff post with a little progress check on each subgroup as of the first week of kickoff!
First up: Business. Business has been… well… busy for the first week, searching for new sponsors, looking for outreach events to enlarge our robotics team, creating and adjusting merchandise, and, of course, making posts about our events throughout the week. Business member Anthony has been reaching out to farmers markets all around Texas to find open stands to spread the word of robotics with. Meanwhile, Lina has been hard at work learning how to use and take photos with the cameras, that way come competition season we have plenty of material to work with.
But or kind of material isn’t that useful for actually making robots. That’s where Manufacturing comes in: throughout the first week, Manufacturing has started work on the court in which the game takes place in since they don’t have any concrete prototypes or designs created by the CAD team yet. They’ve made the terminals, where players load balls into the robot, and the hub, where the robots must shoot the ball up into in order to score points. In the future, they aim to create the ladder climb, where robots latch onto a monkey-bar like structure to gain huge amounts of points close to the end of the game.
Meanwhile, CAD works to create functioning mechanisms and components for the robot, such as a working drive base that can accurately lug a huge chunk of metal around the court attached to a bluetooth controller that has commands for the robot. They’ve also started work on prototyping models for the robot to ensure that the weight is evenly distributed and has accurate measurements for each of its parts.
However, even if the robot is perfectly calibrated in measurements, a lacking job in coding can cause the entire machine to fail. Programming has started work on the internal commands within the robot, such as the intake programs and the commands needed to link the robots movements to the wheels and their motors. They’ve accomplished the most out of every group, and they plan to go even further beyond to now delve into the programming of more specific functions, like the ladder climber and various other subsystems.
Overall, the first week after kickoff has acted as one of the most influential times in planning and creating the robot and related systems. This time has been a massive influence on the team mood of this season and we plan to keep the momentum going throughout the 2022 Build Season. ausTIN CANs out!
To be continued…
