Week 2 of Building! Drivetrain, Brainstorming, and Game Pieces

This week has been crazy. Most of it has been ideas bumping around, and, to be honest, there's not much visual change in our robot. That doesn't mean we haven't been working hard. We've been wracking our brains for ideas every day for ideas in how to build our robot. Last week, we told you we would hopefully reveal some of the progress we made on the other parts of our robot. That was our goal, but...that didn't really happen, so we'll tell you about what we did do.

First, a random update: WE GOT OUR GAME PIECES FOR FREIGHT FRENZY!!! If you missed this update, follow us on Instagram @batteriesnotincludedftc so you can get the next update.

The red game set came in the mail

Thanks to AndyMark for the super cute duckies!

Continuing on the topic of our drivetrain, we were able to make good progress on our drivetrain. We've been working on adding the wheels and motors to the frame we built last week. Some of the pieces we needed for our design came in the mail just a few days ago, so our most interesting progress is limited. After we added the wheels, the drivetrain rolled nicely, but it wouldn't turn! We could force it to turn, but having the motors attached to the wheels do that would be very bad and strain the motors. Turning is very important if we want to be able to score points in this game, so what are our options?

There's two that we can see (we haven't tested either yet). First, the mecanum wheels. We got our game pieces in this week, and we were able to test the clearance of the frame on the barriers that go around the warehouse. Our clearance was perfect: about 1 inch between the top of the plastic rods and the bottom of the chassis. This is about the only good thing about our current robot situation. This means we might be able to switch out the grip wheels that we have on the drivetrain now with the mecanum wheels. As we explained in the last blog post, the mecanum wheels we have are smaller, so this may be a concern alleviated.

Measuring the clearance of the drivetrain over the barrier

Second solution: more wheels. Adding a fifth and sixth wheel on each side, between the wheels we have on right now, would give the robot a pivot point to turn around. As we don't have this pivot, we can't turn right now. These wheels wouldn't have to be powered, just free-turning. This is also a simple fix. We plan on trying out these new ideas as soon as possible.

Now to what we told you would be in this blog post: our design for a claw. We need some way to be able to move the freight pieces up from the ground to the different levels of the shipping hub. Our idea is to use a claw on an elevator lift to move the freight around. We don't have a finished CAD, so I'm going to try to describe it the best I can to you.

We have an elevator lift with stacked extrusions operated by pulleys. Most teams used something very similar during the Skystone season a few years ago. We will attached the claw to one of the extrusions and the lift will be able to reach all the way to the floor and all the way up to the top of the shipping hub. That way, the claw could pick up freight and lift it easily straight from the floor to the shipping hub. Below this lift, attaching it to the rest of the robot, is a rotating platform. This would allow us to not have to turn the robot around in circles all the time to turn around from picking up freight to placing it on the shipping hub. We plan to 3D print this platform and the mechanism that will make it move.

The last part to this claw is, well,...the claw. Our idea is to use rubber bands to grip the different shapes of freight. These rubber bands will be hooked to L-shaped extrusions, each on a servo motor that will close around the freight pieces. I know that's probably not a very good explanation of what this claw will look like, but I'll add in the picture that we found for our inspiration.

Our inspiration for the claw design (ours won't be exactly the same, but similar concept)

Next week, we've got a bunch of things going on, and there probably won't be much in our blog. That doesn't mean we don't want to you to see our post. There may be important and exciting information! Who knows? I can't predict the future! We'll post again next week on the blog! Follow us on Instagram @batteriesnotincludedftc for the most recent updates on our team. We even share different updates on our Instagram than we do on the blog. See you next week! :)