The third week of the LigerBots build season has everyone excited because we can see our robot beginning to take shape! Team members are hard at work all around the workshop, trying to beat the time crunch. With half of build season already over, our work has to accelerate for us to finish the robot on time!

We have started making the robot chassis, which will be an H-drive. Our precision machining will help to make the frame just right!

Many parts are being created for the robot’s elevator mechanism that will lift the ball (“cargo”) and disk (“hatch”) game pieces.

We also made a second, more primitive, elevator that will allow our programmers to test automatic alignment of the elevator to the field element goals.

Our students dedicated to robot vision wrote code that will make the robot automatically align to acquire the playing pieces from the feeder station.

A group of students, mentors, and alumni tested the game piece intake and discussed how it can be improved.

We finished our mockup game-piece loading station, which will allow us to test the acquisition of game pieces by our robot. We have almost finished our mockup of the rocket ship field element, which will allow us to test placement of game pieces from our robot into the goals.

Our electrical group is hard at work soldering wires from the new NEO motors so that they can be used on the robot. We used duct tape and zip ties to make the assembly as neat as possible so that when we need to put it on the robot, we know what connects to what. We are also wiring an electrical test board. Solving electrical problems now will enable rapid wiring of the actual robot once we are ready to do so.

This week our Chairman’s award group revised our essay. We are almost done writing answers to the executive summary questions, and are starting to lay out a plan for their oral presentation.

The graphics group has just finished its preliminary design of our “Destination: Deep Space” pit banners and will now turn our attention to the Chairman’s award submission booklet, which contains our essay as well as information about every aspect of our team.

The LigerBots strategy council calculated the LigerBots standing in FRC by various criteria this week, corresponded with Israeli FRC team Glue Gun and Glitter (whom we are mentoring on game strategy and scouting,) and worked on our speaking skills to communicate better with FRC judges.

We had our weekly build-season team dinner and Saturday lunch, thanks to our dedicated parents.

Only three more weeks to go in our build season!

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.

Blast off! The robot build season has begun! On January fifth, twenty-seven LigerBots students and ten mentors made our annual pilgrimage to Manchester, NH, the home of FIRST founder Dean Kamen, to attend the FIRST Robotics 2019 Destination: Deep Space robot game challenge reveal and kickoff. We had so many LigerBots that we occupied eight cars and nearly a quarter of the bleachers at the Southern New Hampshire University.

In addition to watching the outer-spaced themed game reveal video, we listened to speeches by Dean Kamen, Woodie Flowers, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, and got access to the encrypted game manual so that we could learn all of the rules. Our students were so eager to know the details that many of them read and discussed the entire, 125-page manual in their carpools on the way back to Newton. Everyone wanted to be ready for intense discussions in their three-day design groups the next day.

The LigerBots three-day design process is our way of including every team member, no matter what their usual area of concentration on the team, in the design of our robot. By spreading our rookies and veterans out among the groups we give our newer and quieter members an opportunity to demonstrate, lead, and speak. All team members, including those who usually work on non-technical tasks, meet for two days in groups of nine or ten team members and a mentor, to brainstorm game strategy and general mechanical approaches to accomplishing tasks in the robot game. On the third day a panel of representatives from each group presents the groups’ recommendations for game strategy and robot mechanisms.

Because our team is so big this year we had nine groups, all meeting at different locations during the two days after the game kickoff. Some groups sketched strategy decisions and preliminary designs on a whiteboard, some used a mockup of the playing field to push around game elements. But, every approach led to lively tactical debates about how to score the most points and about the best way to maneuver this year’s game pieces: a playground ball that represents spaceship cargo, and a flat disk that represents a rocket ship hatch panel.

The leaders of our various build groups (who specialize in various mechanical, electrical and programming features of the robot) met on the fourth day to discuss the groups’ proposals and come up with a robot design that would accomplish the consensus game strategy. Our initial ambitions are to place the “cargo” and “hatch panel” into both the low and high goals on the “rocket” field element, and to climb onto the second level of the “habitat” home-base platform. We may add more skills to our robot if we find we have time to do so during our six-week build season.

Our students are now creating our mechanisms with computer aided design (CAD), building field elements to allow us to test our mechanisms, and are experimenting with the game pieces on various surfaces to see how they can best be manipulated. We have begun tracking our processes using the Trello and flame chart project management tools we introduced last season.

Our weekly team dinners have begun, and we are happy to have those brief moments on Friday to eat, relax, and talk about everything we are accomplishing.

The marketing side of our team has also gone into high gear now that we know the robot game. The awards submission group has started writing our Chairman’s Award essay and is devising questionnaires about LigerBots activities to send out to our team members. The awards group has to finish their submission in early February, even before our robot is finished.

Team members are using the elevator pitch skills they learned earlier this fall to pursue the corporate sponsorships and individual donations that allow the team to fund our robot build and outreach activities.

The graphics group has turned from their fall training in designing outreach STEM activity flyers to work on our robot repair-pit banners that show off the game theme and our team sponsors. Work has also begun on the booklet we produce annually that describes and illustrates everything we do at the LigerBots.

We are all so glad to have had the fall to learn new skills. All of them are getting put to good use now that we are in the most exciting and demanding part of our year.

Many team members are headed to Manchester, NH to participate live in the game kickoff. You can watch the show and see the videos from anywhere. The TwitchTV Broadcast begins at 10:30 am ET (preshow at 10:00 am) and can be found here. (Usually it is posted to watch later also). This page on the FIRST website has other links to get the season started. Once the game has been “revealed,” short videos about the game and different components should be available (often findable on YouTube) and the game manual will be “unlocked.” In addition, you can begin to access interpretations of the game as FIRST answers questions and groups like “Robot in 3 Days” try their hand at the rules. Many discussions on Chief Delphi will begin. The LigerBots kick off the season – after the game reveal – with our 3 Day Design Group process.

The LigerBots spent the last meetings before our holiday break swabbing the decks and battening down the hatches for the impending build season. Some of our recent team alumni who recently arrived home for their college winter breaks dropped by our meetings last week to help out.

After unpacking our supplies from the FIRST LEGO League Eastern MA Championship last week we cleaned out our storage spaces at Newton South High School. We filed several thousand dollars worth of raw metal and plastic materials we have recently ordered for building our 2019 robots.

Team members programmed our “road kill” practice robot with new code and libraries from FIRST and learned how to cut precise and repeatable holes with a new cutting tool on our mill. New LigerBots received a tutorial on reading FIRST game manuals so that they can quickly decipher the rules for the new game at kickoff on January 5, and a CAD tutorial that will help them quickly draft parts for our 2019 robot.

Our graphics group reviewed the series design they created for our STEM outreach activity flyers so that they can quickly create more flyers. After kickoff the group will launch right into the 2019 seasonal graphics such as our competition pit banners, robot flyers and team information booklet.

Broad Institute computational biologist Noam Shoresh came for a second visit to mentor the strategy council on their data analysis project. Students gathered data from every team we have played with or against during 2017 and 2018. We intend to use Python software to rank all of the teams by common characteristics such as offensive power rating, which is a measure of how many points on average a team contributes to the matches they play in. This will help us improve our strategy during matches and inform our picks for alliance partners during playoffs.

A large group of LigerBots is expected to make the trip to Bedford, NH on January 5 for the 2019 Destination: Deep Space FIRST Robotics game kickoff, and after that we will have six weeks in which to build and program our robot.