The official build season has come to a close and our robot is in the bag! The last few days of the build season took place over the February school vacation, but our tireless LigerBots students and coaches spent every waking minute over the holiday weekend debugging the robot so it will be ready for the SE Mass. District Event in Bridgewater on March 9.

The last day was devoted to making small changes as we drove the robot around our field element mockups. We continued to adjust our vision systems to accurately line up the robot for placement of Cargo and Hatch Panel game pieces in the Ports and Hatches on the Rocket and Cargo Ship. (Game manual.)

We will have two cameras on this year’s robot: one that gives the human driver a view of the field, and another one that allows the robot to “see” the reflective vision targets on the field elements and automatically align to them. Both of these kinds of robot vision are crucial to this year’s robot. There will be an initial, 15-second “Sandstorm” period in each match when an opaque screen will block the human driver’s view of the entire field. During that time we will be completely dependent on the cameras to know where our robot is and where it is going. And, even after the Sandstorm period is over, the human driver will use both cameras and the vision software to automatically line the robot up to the Ports and Hatches.

We made video clips of these practice sessions and set them to music in our robot reveal video.

Our final touch on the last day was to test the fit of the wood and aluminum perimeter frame so we can put the bumpers (that are still in progress) on the robot right before competition.

As the last hour of the season came to a close we gathered around the robot as it was weighed, slipped into its giant plastic bag, and a photo was made of the zip-tie tag that shows we bagged in time, by the rules.

But, the work is not done after bagging the competition robot. We will continue work on our second robot right up until the Bridgewater competition (and beyond.) Having a second robot allows us to continue testing and improving our systems and allows our driver to get more practice before our first competition.

Last week we continued work on bumpers and wiring for the second robot. Our competition robot currently is able to perform every action required to win points in the game except climb to the top two levels of the Habitat platform at the end of the match. We are planning to reduce the robot’s weight by switching out materials and slimming down parts to allow for the addition of a climbing mechanism. We also continue improving our original Cargo intake mechanism and claw, which we kept out of the bag as part of our 30-pound “withholding allowance.”

Our team members are repairing the 2016 robot, which has been a workhorse at our outreach events. We are using the rehab of its ball-throwing mechanism to further train our less experienced team members. As team veteran Maya said, “When you’re teaching them you’re also learning yourself.”

The 2016 robot made its most recent outreach outing to the MIT Blueprint hackathon last weekend—even during the last days of build we have found a way to do outreach! We demoed the robot and talked to local high school students about the LigerBots and FIRST Robotics during lunch at this learnathon and hackathon at the Stata Center. The participating students were very enthusiastic and interactive, and eager to drive our robot and make binary bracelets.

LigerBots are everywhere! Matthew, a LigerBot who has recently left on a Newton Public Schools exchange to China, recently wore his LigerBots shirt as he gave an introductory speech about his group of American students to the entire Jingshan school where the exchange takes place.

We now have our 2019 team tee shirts and our printed pit banners! We are totally into the theme of this year’s game, Destination: Deep Space. Thaddeus J. Liger(naut) and our valued sponsors are prominently displayed on these items.

Bonus points for anyone who can decode the hexadecimal message on one of the banners’ mission control “monitors.” We are still hard at work on our team guide booklet and on the flyers that will explain our robot’s features to FIRST judges and other teams at competition.

Our first competition of the 2019 season is the New England District SE Mass Event at Bridgewater-Raynham High School which takes place on Saturday and Sunday March 9th and 10th. Free to watch. Come on down! The event should also be live streamed via Twitch TV or the Blue Alliance site. Try this link once the competition launches (about 9 or 9:30 am). Here is a link to the Blue Alliance page listing the teams that will be participating. Typically the competition viewing is 9am – 5:30pm with a break for lunch. Exact times can shift if the event runs behind.

We are in the final stretch! Bag day on Tuesday Feb. 19 signals the end of build season and moves us into competition season. “Bag day” means that we will literally be packing up our competition robot in a massive plastic bag, and we cannot touch the robot again except for during a few designated hours in the week before our first tournament. (Our first tournament is the SE Mass. District Event at Raynham High School in Bridgewater.) We need to have our robot in drivable, bumpered and mechanized condition before we bag it.  

This week we have installed the robot’s pneumatic system and have soldered and wired the electrical system with extreme precision, making sure that there are no short circuits or other small errors that would hamper our robot.

Our software group has written code that allows our robot to pick up and move the cargo (balls) and hatches (discs) effectively, and they are solving some software issues with controlling the ball intake and the motion of the elevator. They have also written an algorithm and code for the camera system that will allow us to see where the robot is going during the “sandstorm” period at the beginning of a match, when the vision of our drive team is blocked.

Our CADing group continues to work on 3D models of our electrical components, elevator, and ball intake. They have been making small design changes to ensure that the various robot systems work correctly together—this is despite the assortment of technical problems they have been having with our CADing program.

We finished cutting the robot’s perimeter plate, which is the exterior wall of the robot where the bumpers are mounted. Our next step is to build the pool-noodle and cloth bumpers that can flip from red to blue, depending on which alliance color we’ve been assigned to for a match. These carry our team number in large letters so everyone knows that it’s the LigerBots robot they’re watching!

We have also built a second robot chassis this year so we can continue to work on our designs after we bag our competition robot. We are allowed to keep 30 pounds of our 125-pound competition robot out of the bag as a “withholding allowance” for further improvement, so we have decided to retain our claw and ball intake for more work. We will mount these mechanisms on our second chassis along with any other system we might want to add to the competition robot right before a tournament.

In the meantime, our drive team has been working on a technique to efficiently hold and utilize the robot controller. We’re repurposing an Xbox controller, and our drive team has been figuring out an efficient way to be able to press all the buttons needed while playing a match. We are on target to test our driving by the end of the weekend.

The official competition season has not yet begun, but there are teams who have not only finished their robot before bag day, but are ready to compete! Some have organized unofficial pre-bag-day tournaments so that other teams can test their robot designs and get in some driving practice in a realistic game setting. Our strategy council has assembled a group of team members to start scouting practice this weekend for week 0. We will use these preseason competitions to test out the scouting sheets and scouting process we will use this year.  Our scouting alliance continues to grow, and we welcome 6731, Record Robotics! We have further “turduckened” our alliance logo to accommodate this new addition. The next step would be to train our alliance teams on scouting so that we will all have useful data and a successful season.

As noted in previous posts, winning the Chairman’s award would advance us to the next level of competition regardless of how our robot performs. It also would announce us as one of the teams that best expresses what the FIRST organization represents. We previously won the award in 2015 at both the district and NE Championship level. Last week we submitted our essay and questions to FIRST. The other piece of the judging process involves formal and informal presentations at our competitions, so we continue to work on refining our presentation, practicing our elevator pitches and preparing materials like our team overview booklet and flyers. We have even sung and recorded a song for the Chairman’s video, which would get played on a large screen for everyone at the competition should we win.

We have been working on our robot reveal video and preparing for several upcoming outreach trips and events. On Feb. 23 we will be at the MIT Blueprint hackathon with an activity booth and on Feb. 26 we will be meeting with local politicians at the Southern New England Advocacy Conference (SNEAC) about STEM initiatives.

This week we welcomed ALM Works as a new Puma level sponsor! Their donation helps us make up for the loss of one of our larger sponsors earlier this year. This means that we can continue training our team members, building robots and promoting STEM in Newton.

It is really great to see just how far we have come since the start of build season.

This was the fifth week of our six-week build season, and that means that the LigerBots are in a time crunch. Because we have improved our design processes and our ability to manufacture complex parts over the past few years, we are able to include parts we could previously only dream of putting on our robot. But it now takes longer to get to the point of actually assembling the robot than it did a few years ago. We are busy for weeks, designing and making parts we know will work rather than attaching pieces hit-or-miss. Luckily, when we finally get to the point of assembly, the robot now comes together quickly. This week we started putting together all of the robot parts we have been manufacturing during the past month.

We were lucky to have an early release day from school last Wednesday, which allowed us to put in extra time on the robot. Our robot now has an elevator, a “cargo” ball intake, and a claw that will place game pieces, plus wheels, motors, and pneumatics. This week we cut lots of metal plates for our elevator and for various mounts, which enabled us to attach the electrical board, battery, pistons, camera, and rope for the elevator.

There were obstacles to overcome this week, as there always are during the robot build. We had trouble with the ball bouncing out of the robot before the claw could grab it so we added a bar to trap it in the claw. And, we had to replace and reposition the piston that kicks the ball out of the claw.

What we don’t have yet are wired electronics and a mounted camera to acquire images for our robot vision system. Next week we hope to have this camera and software in place so that our driver can “see” where the robot is and control it during the “sandstorm” period of this year’s competitions, when an opaque curtain is lowered between the drivers and the playing field for fifteen seconds. The vision system will also allow our robot to automatically align to its targets during all phases of competition.  

Until we wire the electrical board we have no computer control, and we have to move all the mechanisms around with our hands. We hope have to do a full integration test next week to see if everything will work together. Our newly-announced drive team is eager for us to finish so that they can start driving practice!

Thanks to generous funding from our donors and sponsors, we are continuing our practice of building two copies of our robot so we can tweak and improve the second one after the first one is sealed into its giant plastic bag at the end of the official build season. Since we’re allowed to keep 30 lbs of our 120 lb robot “out of the bag” and continue working on it until competition we have decided to make the intake and the claw mechanisms part of our “withholding allowance.” We will continue improving them right up until our first competition, the SE MA District Event at Raynham High School in Bridgewater, MA on March 9 and 10. We’ll have a few sanctioned hours before the competition to transfer our improved parts onto our competition robot.

The LigerBots strategy council has finished its analysis of the offensive power rating (OPR) of all of the New England District FRC teams. We also have created a scouting alliance with three other FRC teams to collaborate on collecting data about other teams and their robots’ performance during this year’s competitions. We use these data to improve our robot drive team’s game strategy, and to optimize our picks of alliance partners when we make it to tournament playoffs as an alliance captain.

Our awards group has turned in our Chairman’s Award submission, and is now developing the oral presentation the group will give to judges at our competitions. We do extensive preparation for this presentation because winning the Chairman’s award (given to the team that best exemplifies the values of FIRST Robotics,)  would automatically move us to the next level of competition no matter how our robot performs.

We have resumed training the entire team on talking to awards judges, other teams and potential sponsors thanks to the help of Elizabeth McVittie, a new mentor who’s an expert in finance and public speaking.

The design of our robot repair-pit publicity banners is finished and we are working on the 50-page booklet about our team that we use at competitions and outreach events all year. One-hundred-fifty blank tee shirts have been sent off to the graphics department at Newton North High School to be screen printed with this year’s team and sponsor logos.

We’ve sure come a long way since kickoff. The entire workshop is in high gear in the runup to the end of build season, and we are looking forward to putting our robot, and ourselves, to the test at our first event.

The LigerBots just finished week four of build season, and our project planning board is full of sticky notes, each one for an individual task in the works. At the end of every team meeting we gather in the shop to report on what we have accomplished that day and proudly spear the note for each finished task on a spike at the back of the task board.

We meet six days a week during build season, and we need every hour of meeting time to finish our robot and our competition-season marketing. Thanks to increased sponsorship of our team during the past few years we have been able to make two identical robots each year. This allows us to continue work on our design, using our second robot for testing, even after the six week build season is over and we must put our competition robot into storage until our first tournament.

This year we are making two chassis and two game-piece elevators, but only one set of arms to place the game pieces into the goals, and one intake for the “cargo” ball. The intake will roll the ball in from the floor into the center of the robot. Arms on an elevator will pick up the ball from inside the robot once it is rolled in, or get a “hatch” disk from the loading station. The arm will place the ball or hatch panel into the field element goals. Since we are allowed to keep working on 30 lbs of our robot after the end of the official build season, we will be able to continue iterating designs for the arms and intake until we are satisfied with their performance.

Putting our robot’s electronics on a lightweight, perforated polycarbonate board that has lots of holes for zip ties has given us flexibility in where we place our components.

We are creating a robot vision system consisting of cameras and software that will allow the robot to “see” the reflective tape on the field elements and align the robot to the goals.

This week we finalized our sponsorship list for competition season and started adding sponsor logos and names to all of our competition and outreach materials. The support of our valued sponsors and donors means that we will have the funds to continue building robots and promoting STEM in Newton. But, fundraising at the LigerBots never stops, so we will continue to reach out to companies in our community for support.

We have finished our Chairman’s award submission essay and are working on the list of questions we must answer for the submission. Team members sang and recorded the song they wrote for our Chairman’s award video. Now we can turn our attention to preparing the oral presentation that we will give to FIRST judges during our competitions.

We are in the midst of creating the team booklet that includes the essay and lots of other information about the LigerBots. Fall training in graphics, writing, and public speaking has ensured that our students are able to work quickly on the various aspects of the Chairman’s award submission now that it’s crunch time.

After a recent team dinner we all gathered for a team photo in the Newton South High School cafeteria.

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