Last year, while the CAD team worked on the robot, our software team was unable to actively work on a drivebase to code the autonomous routines and test the softwares for different subsystems while our mechanical (build) team was preparing the electrical systems.

This year, to solve this issue, we have two different swerve bases, one for testing and one for our final robot. We decided to do this in order to give our software team time to practice developing and tuning autonomous routines and vision, while another base could be used for building and prototyping those handoffs.

While our CAD team was designing our main robot superstructure, our build team immediately set to work building the alpha robot drivebase for prototyping.

Thank you to Fabworks for the beautifully pocketed bellypan and battery plates!

Week 2: Building the Field

During the first week through the second week, we began working on our practice field layout and build. Based on the space available in the larger room of our workshop, we are planning to build roughly a quarter field. We have two-thirds of a reef, the auto line is touching the wall, and the driver station is slightly outdoors, but for the purposes of autonomous routines and fitting the field elements in, it will be adequate.

One reason this is possible is that we have a new rolling pit that stores all of our tools that can be moved around our working space. This allows us to accommodate more space to a field.

We are planning to take this pit to our regionals for an easy “roll-in, roll-out”. It is designed to fit into a U-Haul trailer and contain our batteries, tools, and air compressor.

As of week 3 we have made nearly all of our desired field elements and are working on piecing them together. For the reef, we used some of the vertical shelving pieces from our previous pit to build the base structure. Although it is steel angle, it ends up being lighter than a fully-wood build. We’ll send more updates once we run some autonomous routines using these elements.