This season, we designed and built a new robot named Hydra to compete in this year’s FRC game, Reefscape.

** If you’re interested in learning more about our kickoff, click this! **

To kick off the build season, the team watched a reveal video of the game. We then split into small groups to begin mechanism designing for the next 3 days. Once every group presented their ideas, our team started building the robot. It’s sure to be a stressful journey, as we have only 7 weeks before our first competition!

“We’re trying to stay on track so we can have a working robot for competition” said Zach H, Robot driver

We purchased the MK4I Swerve drive from a vendor called SDS (Swerve Drive Specialties) to allow the robot to move in all directions and rotate easily. This is key to doing well at the competition and beating out tough competitors we may face.

“We’re on a pretty good pace with our main [competition] robot, and our choice this year to build the Kitbot has payed off really well in getting a head start on programming and testing, says Wes H, Chief Technical Officer

In this game, Hydra earns endgame points and a possible ranking point by climbing onto a high-hanging shallow cage, with additional points for a low-hanging deep cage.

“It was a lot of prototyping and we discovered many different ways we could approach this obstacle” said Sarah H, Climber Mechanism Build Lead

The intake has wheels that spin to make way for the algae, green playground balls used as game pieces, into the robot. The intake team struggled at first, having problems with the motors on the sides of the intake, but were eventually successful.

“We had to restart, but we have a second design and it’s going good,” said Hannah S, Algae Intake Build Lead.

Branding is important to our team, especially at competitions where every team will have custom pins available. Our bright red, orange, and yellow tie-dye design is representative of our team and has become a part of the LigerBots brand. We give out many of our team buttons outreach events, but we give out hundreds at competitions where members of other teams collect them.

While the mechanical team was building the robot, the graphics team was hard at work making designs for this year’s competition pit banner, merchandise, and team flyers. While the Graphics team remains in their separate space, there is still lots of collaboration with other team members for projects such as the booklet.

“Graphics isn’t just about designing stuff, it’s also about the contents as well,” says Yushi T, VP of Graphics.

This was a successful and exciting build season, and we can’t wait to see Hydra’s performance at competitions and hopefully win some awards! Stay tuned for our first competition, Week 0 (a pre-season event), on Saturday, February 15 at Merrimack, New Hampshire!