Build Season is officially over! Whew!

Yesterday’s Part 3 post explains many of our accomplishments and issues with the current state of the robot. We are now compiling three lists.

1. What parts we need to buy to complete our second robot

2. What we will be doing as soon as we get to Davis (our first competition)

3. What we will be doing between now and Davis.

We will be posting updates every few days from now until competition about the status of the second robot. We will also be posting several updates during our Davis and SVR competitions, so remember to visit again soon!

Below is a gallery of over 150 images of the robot that we bagged. This documentation (along with hundreds over other photos and many videos) will allow up to closely replicate this robot and give us insight for future years. Note that we did take off the shooter component and mount it to the second robot before it was bagged as a part of our 30 pounds we get to keep out of the bag to work on. We will not be changing the shooter much, but rather, it will help us complete our look up table (discussed in previous posts) which will enable us to automatically make baskets.

Today we got close to finishing the rollers for the belts. The bumper mounts are complete and we found some cool resonance when you bump them together (see video below).

We also made significant progress with OpenCV, however it is quite slow compared to the previous custom code.  We will find ways to optimize it for speed later once the functionality is up to par.

As we have access to a large indoor space this Friday, we are building a prototype ball launcher that closely replicates  that of our actual robot to experimentally determine air resistance. While we have done the kinematics for an optimized basketball shot, after some research we found that air resistance could play a role in altering the ball’s position.

As you can see below, we created a cool animated gif image of the frame pieces to give you a glance at what our frame will look like before getting welded. Note that the set of aluminium that holds up the middle section is merely a placeholder.