The LigerBots workshop is bustling with activity as robot design and construction, fundraising, game strategy, awards preparation, and graphic design ramp up during our second week of build season.

Part of the game this year involves picking up large bouncy ball off of the ground, and the mechanical group has been testing two main ideas for a ball intake that came out of our three-day design process. One was a “through-bumper” intake and the other was an “over-the bumper” intake. The bumpers are cloth-covered pool noodles attached to the robot’s perimeter. Creating a through-bumper intake requires having a section of the robot without bumpers and being able to move the ball sideways into our intake. This didn’t go well in testing, so the team will continue to prototype other designs that intake the ball over the bumper. For example, this week one of our first-year members built a prototype for a “grabber” to pick up the ball.

The manufacturing group has been upping our precision manufacturing skills, especially by improving our mill setup so that we can do easily repeatable, accurate holes. We are continuing to train new team members on the use of our power equipment. Once the robot design has finished, the manufacturing group will begin to cut and assemble the robot chassis.

We have made good progress on the construction of robot game field elements to use for testing our robot. Right now we are working on a mockup of the loading station, from which we pick up disk and ball game pieces.

This week we added pneumatics for the “roadkill,” an extra robot chassis that we can add mechanisms to and use for testing purposes. We have also been making heavy use of our project-management sticky-note board. This efficient system means that always we always know what we have to do next!

Our programming group has written some new code to help drive our 2019 robot. New team members have learned coding techniques and the group has updated the firmware to be used by our robot. Once the robot’s main parts are finished, in a couple of weeks, the programming group will move on to coding the actual actions that the robot will do during the competition. We continue to CAD our robot design to make sure all of our desired mechanisms will fit together properly when we manufacture them.

After mulling competing designs, the strategy council has chosen a setup for the paper charts we use for scouting, on which we record the actions of all of the robots that play in each of our competitions. We will be scouting cooperatively this year with team 157 Aztechs, and team 246 Overclocked, so that fewer of our team members need to do scouting at one time, and to help the Aztechs and Overclocked with their scouting strategies. The council has also finished ranking by offensive power rating (OPR) all of the teams we have played with or against in 2017 and 2018. We hope that this ranking will help inform our picks for alliance partners in any playoffs we succeed in reaching. More data are still to be crunched!

Our fundraising group has been writing letters and emails to ask for new corporate team sponsorships. Fundraising is an especially urgent task for us during this expensive part of our season because we have lost several of our larger corporate sponsors in the past year. We also have been making instagram posts. (Check out our Instagram account here: https://www.instagram.com/ligerbots_frc2877/?hl=en).

The awards group has been drafting and editing an essay to submit for the FIRST Robotics Chairman’s award, the most prestigious award that we could win at one of our competitions, given to a team that best exemplifies the principles of the FIRST organization. The awards group is also preparing an oral presentation to give to awards judges, and creating a video, with music, to accompany it.

The graphics group is designing banners that will decorate the front of the metal-framed robot repair “pit” that we use at competitions. These banners will contain images that tie in with this year’s outer-space robot game theme, and will, as always, show off our team sponsor logos. Once that is done this group will start work on the informational booklet about the LigerBots that we produce every year. The booklet accompanies our awards submissions, and is also used year-round as a resource at our outreach events.

There is still a lot of work left to do during the rest of build season, but it’s nice to see all the progress we have already made.