2020 FRC Robot
Designed to shoot dodgeballs with extreme accuracy, in addition to other challenges
Although the season got cancelled after one competition, due to COVID-19, my robotics team still made a great robot. If the season hadn’t been cancelled I think we would’ve done really well; we won our first competition at Georgian College. The game was based on Star Wars Episode IV, where Luke destroys the Death Star. In this FRC depiction, dodgeballs had to be scored through a goal, and then at the end of the match, the robot had to climb a rung.
As a mentor on the team, I helped high school students with the conceptual design, prototyping, final design and build process. Teaching members new skills and passing on knowledge is really fulfilling and important to me, and mentoring my old robotics team was a perfect way to do this. During this season I mainly helped design the intaking mechanism and the shooting mechanism.
For the intake, the main challenge was automatically centering the balls so they could be stored in the hopper. To do this we used Mecanum wheels that would roll the ball into the center and then pick it up. And for the shooter, it was vital to automatically aim at the target from any angle or distance. To accomplish this we designed a custom bushing that the ball could be passed through, this bushing was mounted to a ring gear so the entire shooter could be rotated. In addition to this, the length of the hood could be adjusted on the fly for different shot lengths.