Robin Dorfman, Team 980’s Outreach/Business mentor, was selected as the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award winner at the Aerospace Valley Regional on April 6, 2019. Robin was selected by a FIRST committee of prior Woodie Flowers Award winners based on a essay submitted by Team 980 students. The essay cited Robin’s passion in having our students spread the mission of FIRST across “Thunder Valley” – the footprint of Team 980 across the northern Los Angeles area. She worked with students to develop and showcase effective Chairman’s, Engineering Inspiration and Entrepreneurship award presentations at Regional Events. Robin joins three other mentors in receiving Woodie Flowers Finalist Awards: Alex Davis (2018), David Toyne (2016) and lead mentor David Brinza (2013).
Team 980 achieved an important milestone last Saturday: we completed a successful Robot Design Review!
Our mechanical design team presented SolidWorks renderings of the entire robot, including motion studies which show we can stow and reach the top cargo opening with our 3-jointed arm. Design details for the worm-gear drives (shoulder, elbow, wrist) were illustrated, with fabrication approach discussed. The end effector design was also presented and is rather mature. We intend to build our first test model this week. Our drive assembly and chassis is already in fabrication, with the layout of electronics in the available space in work. Controls walked through our velocity-control and possible autonomous modes – great progress there!
We talked about ruggedness, simplicity and mass of the robot, particularly for the arm assembly. We plan to drive the robot hard (right up to the end game, where we’ll fly unto level 2). We have some concepts for mounting the mast of the arm to the robot chassis which will absorb energy and would like students to brainstorm their own concepts early this week.
We’re on the right path to build a good robot – let’s keep up the pace and start testing our competition robot in two weeks!
The team made great progress the past few days! Arm concept has matured, drivetrain/chassis is in fabrication, controls team has velocity-control working, and field elements are nearly complete. (just need to finish hab and make a cargo ship port)
– David Brinza, Lead Mentor
Controls
After a very long weekend, the controls team has successfully implemented velocity control! We first discussed the theory behind PID-based velocity control before prototyping our algorithm. Then, we spent most of the day on Monday implementing and tuning our new PID system, remapping the joystick’s velocity curve, enabling and tuning the system for high gear, tweaking our arcade drive control system, and encapsulating the entire system in an easy-to-configure class.
It was a very long meeting!
– Luke, Head of Controls
Business and Outreach
Over the past week, the Chairman’s Team has chosen the theme for the essay, “Thunder Valley!!!” We’ve started drafting the Chairman’s Essay and have refined our Executive Summary questions almost to perfection. Work for the Chairman’s video has also begun and we hope to refine the script and start thinking about filming in the coming weeks! Overall, progress has been steady and we will continue to work on writing the essay so we are finished well before the deadline and have plenty of time to revise and edit!
– Ethan, Head of Business and Outreach
Fabrication
Entering week two, those of us in Fabrication set our eyes on two goals: finishing some field elements and creating parts for the competition robot.
We finalized the full rocket build and added vision tape and hook and loop fastener. Soon after, the drive team stress-tested it quite rigorously with some crash tests as the driver began learning the new control system with the practice robot. Additionally, we made several of the parts for the competition robot drive train as soon as Design gave us the prints, and we assembled the frame with those pieces. We expect to be putting wheels, belts, and gearboxes on the frame before week three is over, and hopefully getting a testing arm done to put on our practice robot.
– Mateo, Head of Fabrication
Design
In week 3, the Design team finalized the arm drive mechanism and began tweaking the old end effector design to make a new one, velcro surface will be integrated into the roller mechanism using encoders and velcro surface on certain parts of the roller. At this point we have a lot of our specific design concepts pinned down.
Welcome back to the Team 980 blog and thank you for choosing us for all your robotics bloggy needs! We are a little late on getting this one out and that is my fault, grades were due… Since we had a lot of updates from the different subteams and we are already late, we will post them all together in this post. In the future when grades are not due, each big update will get its own day and only small updates would be posted together like this. So buckle up, pull on the yellow strap (Disneyland reference), and hold on while we go around the buildspace and see what everyone was doing this last week.
– Alex Davis, Chronically late blog and controls mentor
Fabrication
As Week One of build season comes to a close, the Fabrication area of Team 980 ThunderBots is excited to report our accomplishments. We have completed three of our five desired field elements, the Hatch Loading Station and Hab Levels 2 & 3, to assist in prototyping and in creating autonomous code. Fabrication also prepared the mechanical elements of our practice robot by scrapping the driving base of an older robot, and handed it over to Controls to wire up.
The team has also semi-decided on a articulating arm to pick up and deliver both game pieces so a couple of us were tasked with finding the gear reductions we would need for our arm’s joints. We settled on ratios that would give us high torque but still let us move fast, so changing loads will not affect our cycles. Here’s to another good week!
– Mateo, Head of Fabrication
Business and Outreach
This week the Business and Outreach team created a timeline for when the various award materials must be completed such as the chairman’s essay, the executive summary, judge presentation booklets, and pit decor. We also discussed acquiring new members for the sub-team to ensure we have enough people to give an exemplary chairman’s presentation. For week two we plan to begin brainstorming ideas for the theme of our chairman’s essay as well as outline what information we want to include. Additionally, we will begin brainstorming themes for the chairman’s video.
– Ethan, Head of Business and Outreach
Design
After kickoff and the game reveal our design team immediately jumped into action. We began developing various concepts for this year’s robot and looking at very basic prototypes. At the start of the week, all four Team 980 subteams came together to work on basic designs, each focusing on a certain aspect of the new game. By deliberating between all of our members, we were able to develop objectives for our robot and a game strategy. As we progressed throughout the week, the design team individually developed more advanced concepts as well as started the 3D assembly of this year’s drivetrain.
On Saturday we once again convened with the team and continued work on the concepts that the design team were able to expand upon. The entire team continued to focus on refining some of the early concepts of game piece pick-up and articulation. Longtime design team member Sea developed a small scale prototype of an articulating arm, while another group led by Robert worked with our fabrication team to make a full-size prototype of a cargo pickup mechanism. Dhruv, Robert and I continued to work in CAD on the frame and drivetrain assemblies. As we go onto week 2 of the build season we are going to start preliminary designs of the arm and game piece manipulators, as well as develop more concepts for a method of mounting the habitat platforms.
– Sean, Head of Design
Controls
After investigating the changes to the 2019 Control System, the Controls team has been wiring and configuring a practice drive base “borrowed” from the 2017 robot. As a training exercise, we had all the new controls team members lead robot system board rebuild including both electronics and pneumatics. On Saturday, we successfully got it driving!
Hello and welcome to the inaugural post of the newly rebuilt Team 980 build season blog. Now for those of you who are familiar with robotics competitions, the team, and FIRST, bear with me because there will be some people reading this who have no idea what we are all about and need a little background.
FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an organization that allows students from elementary school through high school to build and compete with robots of their own creation. Team 980 “ThunderBots” participates in the High School division of FIRST where the robots can be as big as some of the students and compete on a field bigger than most classrooms. (The number 980 is our registration number within the high school division of FIRST. More teams are identified by their number than their name.) Our students have the opportunity to work with adult mentors from industry that advise and help the students build the robot they will be competing with. There is a catch though, unlike industry robots that are developed over a matter of years, these students only get 6 weeks to build and test their robot before competition. It’s intense, and a whole lot of fun!
Ok stop that thought right there. I know you were all thinking it… BATTLEBOTS! It’s on tv, on the internet, it looks exciting I know. But that is not what we are trying to do here. We are training the engineers of tomorrow. We want to teach them to do more than install a giant sledge hammer on top of some wheels to face off against a robot with a flamethrower. If you have seen it, the size of our robots can actually be bigger than the ones on tv, and our robots play games like basketball, soccer, even extreme frisbee. What we focus on is teaching them principles of design, fabrication, electronics and programming. Oh, and the kids do all the work! The mentors are only there to advise, guide and teach the students how to make their ideas work.
After hearing all of that, if you’re still interested, and if you made it this far in the post you probably are, here is what you will be seeing here. As we are currently in our 6 week build season, Team members will be giving little reports on what they are doing on our current robot design and why. They will talk about their progress and give all of you readers a little insight into the engineering that goes on in a robotics team buildspace. After the 6 weeks are over, you will hear about what we are doing to prepare for competition. Beyond that point we will continue throughout the year with posts about off season activities.
So keep watch here, our next post will probably be January 16, the middle of week 2 of our build season. We are looking forward to a really fun build season and are happy to bring all of you along for the ride.
– Alex (Controls Mentor for FRC Team 980 ThunderBots)
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