This Week in FRC - Jan 26, 2024

As a recap, this year’s First Robotics Competition game, presented by HAAS, is called “Crescendo”. The 2024 game requires a robot to be able to intake a disk like foam ring and successfully shoot it into three different scoring areas – the speaker, amp, and trap! At the end of the game, robots will even need to hang off a chain structure! This week: 1/26, in the depths of room 601, we, 7419 are proud to say we have been working hard for the past 3 weeks since Kickoff. Each of our three departments have made significant progress this week, taking us one step closer to our end goal! We consider ourselves a family of Robotics students and we're proud to introduce the rest of Quarry Lane to our latest development: the “Alpha” robot!

Hardware

This week, hardware has been working on the “Alpha” robot. This is from our weeks of prototyping, ready for testing. The robot consists of a reliable intake system similar to what we had last year, albeit with major improvements to better fit this year’s game. These adjustments include different wiring, servos and motors being attached in various new places, and new reference CAD of the robot (in full detail too!). The intake system attached to the “Alpha” robot does an extraordinary job of handling the Note (this year’s game element) carefully for potential scoring. With its precise accuracy and aim, we’re reaching for the maximum possible points! Hardware has been putting in 10+ shop hours each week for an efficient delivery of our latest robot, and those hours have paid off!

Software

In parallel with hardware’s quick pace, software has been working to implement exciting new control techniques. A large part of this involves detecting AprilTags on the field, allowing us to determine the robot’s position in real-time. By taking our robot’s velocity and heading into account, the robot will be able to autonomously determine the correct speed and orientation of the shooter to score from any location on the field, even while moving! While this is exciting as a whole, members have been fine-tuning many of the feedback loops of our various mechanisms to produce fine control for every part to coalesce as a whole. These strategies include motion profiling and system identification. One of the more innovative prospects that we hope to incorporate involves telemetry and logging. Ubiquitous throughout industry, logging keeps track of every single piece of data produced by sensors, joysticks, and any other data flowing through the robot code. Used in conjunction with high frequency localization, the new CAN FD protocol will enable lower latency and time synchronization to produce much more accurate estimations.

Business This week in the business department, we began to film for the Impact Award! This award is the most important award in the competition, and could be a ticket to Worlds. For the next couple of weeks, we will continue filming, aiming to showcase the unique aspects of our team and our dedication to spreading STEAM education around the globe. We were also present at Quarry Lane’s 1/28 Expo to share our experiences and knowledge with students!

If there are any questions, please email qls7419leadership@gmail.com. Check out our Instagram, @7419tech, for more frequent updates as well as our Youtube channel, 7419 Tech Support (@7419tech), for long form informational videos about our team. Our team is super excited for the season ahead, and we can’t wait to update everyone more in the future!