2012 Build Season Week 3

Week 3 was finals week at our school. In past years, we didn’t meet during finals week until Friday, when the final exams were over. This year the team captains, who are mostly seniors, wanted to continue to meet during finals week. As expected, they were the only ones who showed up, in addition to the mentors.

At the end of Week 3, the CAD model was 99% complete except for some sensors. The practice robot chassis and the above chassis frame were also completed. The belting for the ball conveyor system was cut to length and welded together. Also, the fabrication of the frame parts for the competition robot was started.

We have a new design for our bumpers this year. It is easier to build, and it will take even less time to change. In our first year, it took 5 to 10 minutes to change the bumpers from one color to the other. In our second year, we managed cut it down to about 1 minute. Last year, it was a 2 piece bumper design that took about 15 seconds. This year, we projected that it would take 5 to 10 seconds to change the bumpers. This is part of our continuous improvement mentality without compromising the structural integrity of the bumper attachment system.

2012 Build Season Week 2

This year we are using a new build process that the team captains put into place. Instead of making parts in random order or wait until we have all the parts before we assemble, we divided up the robot into multiple subsystems. We staggered the fabrication and assembly of the subsystems in logical order to maximize the use of the tools and minimize wait time. We also standardized how parts are attached together and pre-made those standard parts in week one. All of these small attachment brackets are in the CAD model and even the holes of the rivets are pre-planned. The result is a very systematic way of building and the robot comes together like furniture from IKEA.

One of the key for this success is by spending more time in CAD. All the attachments are planned and all the holes are predrilled on the drill press so there is no issue of hard to reach area for drilling. Another side benefit is the quality of the joints. Every piece is square to one another with no gaps unlike our previous years’ robots.

By the end of week two, the CAD model is done except for the turret and shooter. The shooter design is very intricate and will probably take the most amount of time to build. We hope to have the robot structure finished by Day 28 and electrical and pneumatics done by Day 34. This will give us plenty of time to calibrate the shooter and other sensors.

2012 Build Season Week 1

The kickoff at Novi High School was well organized and they had some excellent speakers. I stayed in the afternoon to give a seminar like the last 3 years. The topic this year was on Scouting in FIRST Robotics Competition. One group of students took the Kit of Parts and did the inventory. Others went home to read the game rules. In the evening we had our first team meeting to discuss the game and did the QFD analysis of the game to select the most important attributes of the robot.

On Sunday afternoon, we again reviewed the game to make sure all students have the same understanding of the game. We also went over the QFD results. Then we broke up into smaller groups to brainstorm on different aspects of the robot. One group did the bridge raising and lowering device. One group did the ball collection system and one worked on the shooting system. It was a productive meeting as we had everybody’s participation.

A lot of work was accomplished this first week. CAD was about 75% done but there were still a lot of finishing touches to do. The partial practice field was almost finished with the new game elements. We are still waiting for the basketball rims to arrive. The awards team and the strategy team had started their work. The programming team was successful in using LabVIEW 2011 to connect to the 2010 robot. We drove the 2010 robot and tried to balance it on the bridge. It was much harder than we thought although the weight distribution of the team version was wrong making it difficult to balance.