The FIRST Robotics build season ends in the middle of February school vacation, and the LigerBots went full blast right through “bag day,” putting finishing touches on our robot, “Chronos,”  before we had to seal it in its giant plastic bag, where it stays until we compete.

While the electrical team mounted the pneumatics and wired the elevator, the group working on our Power Cube intake cut material for the next iteration of its design. Other students worked on getting the robot fit-and-finish up to standard by building bumpers and mounting the sponsor panel.

Meanwhile on the second robot, which does not have to be bagged, our programmers began testing code for driving and intaking cubes, and are currently testing autonomous modes.

On Sunday, February 17 the Ligerbots visited the build space of FRC 5422, Stormgears, who graciously offered us the use of their full size practice field on which to test drive our robot. While we were there we filmed our 2018 robot reveal video, which you can watch here.

While at the Stormgears build space, we noticed that the plates on the outside stage of our elevator were bending. The Stormgears made us a generous offer to use their pristine milling equipment to help us manufacture new steel plates, something that would have taken multiple days at our home shop, but was done in just two hours, thanks to them.

On the last day of the build season the team worked a twelve-hour day, finishing electrical details before removing the elevator and replacing the bent plates with the ones we made at the Stormgears. At the end of the work session we did more driving practice in the field house at Newton South. When we bagged the robot at 10 p.m, everybody celebrated!

In the next few weeks we will continue to practice driving and programming using the second robot, and will design mechanisms that could be added to the robot at competition.

We have opened our annual 3D Printed Design contest for submissions from other FIRST Robotics teams. Our team created this contest in 2016 when we realized there was no established FRC award for 3D printing, which teams increasingly use to build custom parts during the six-week FIRST Robotics build season. We hope this contest will encourage teams to start seeing 3D printing as a viable design solution for their robot. Teams can send their submissions to [email protected]. Please look here for complete rules.

The LigerBots also recently submitted applications for four major FIRST awards: Chairman’s (honoring the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST, ) Entrepreneurship, Woodie Flowers (given to an outstanding mentor) and Dean’s List (given to an outstanding sophomore or junior student). Our Chairman’s Award group is now deep into practice for their seven-minute presentation before judges at the FIRST Power Up North Shore competition at Reading High School on March 17 and 18 and at the Greater Boston competition at Revere High School on April 7 and 8. We are excited to compete for these awards at our two district competitions! Please come to watch us live as we compete at these events, or watch us in real time, online.

See the YouTube video of our robot in action on the playing field at the Stormgears, FRC Team 5422, who graciously let us practice in their space earlier this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhyccJPUCFc

We’re in the thick of the robot build season! The robot is coming together, and the enthusiasm in the team is infectious. The elevators for our two robots are nearly done, and we are building the final design of our intake. Our team members have been interviewed by a reporter from an international teachers’ magazine, and we had a visit from SharkNinja engineers.

For the past few years the LigerBots have built two robots, one that is sent to competitions and one that is used for testing and practice. We have to seal our competition robot into a giant plastic bag at the end of the 6-week build season and are not allowed to touch it until competitions start. However, after “bag day” we will still have a couple of weeks before our first competition that we can use our second robot to further test to mechanisms, fix potential problems and train our drive team.

We have finished the fence for our “switch” field element replica, and completed the design for the “scale” tower. We hope to be able to use both for practice soon. We have assembled one electric board for each of our two robots, and have almost finished both of the elevators.

We have started building and testing the final design for the intake. It consists of two arms extending outside of the robot with two wheels at the end of each arm. The wheels will pull the cube inside the robot while the arms can spread and narrow to accommodate different orientations of the cube.

We’ve had many visitors this week! On Tuesday a reporter from TES, an education publication based in the UK, came to interview team members. The reporter asked about the “maker” culture in the US and the role FIRST plays in keeping students interested in STEM and providing them with alternative, hands-on ways of learning STEM skills. He interviewed Cam and Arushi about being on the LigerBots and how the team has impacted their lives. It was an honor to be featured and we can’t wait to see the article!

We had a large contingent from Puma-level sponsor SharkNinja, including three full-time engineers and six co-op students from Northeastern, Olin, and MIT. They toured the shop and some might become mentors, which is thrilling for the team! 

The LigerBots have had a productive week three week of robot build season! We made many advances in constructing our robot’s mechanisms, its electrical system, its software, and the wooden field elements we will use for driving practice. Many dedicated team members worked to better the robot and work out flaws in the design. Our FIRST awards group has also been making good progress on our Chairman’s and Entrepreneurship award submissions to FIRST.

We had a mid-build shop safety refresher from field elements mentor Jay, who made a model hand out of wood and vividly demonstrated the various ways students could hurt themselves if they were not alert when using the power tools. Then he taught our team how to better protect ourselves from losing fingers and eyes.

After much CADing and work on our milling machines, our chassis is finished, and our electrical group has finished wiring the drive train and mounting the motor controllers.

We decided to go with a tank drive that uses six wheels.  The four rear wheels can roll only backward and forward. However, the front two wheels are omni wheels, which look like a string of beads wrapped tightly around a circular hub. An entire omni wheel can roll forward or backwards while its beads roll at 90 degrees to help the wheel slip sideways. As a result, the robot can pivot around its center to change directions. We hope this will allow our robot to be both nimble and difficult to push off course by defensive robots during competition.

Our field elements group has created a frame and basket for the scale.

We have started adding the elevator mechanism to lift the “cube” game pieces, and are working on our fourth design for a cube intake mechanism.

We started out using many wheels to suck in the cube and are now down to two. It takes a lot of time and concentration to keep designing and making improved mechanisms, but this iterative process is at the core of our team’s lessons in real-life engineering.

Even during our six week, robot-build season, the LigerBots do STEM outreach! This week we demonstrated our 2016 robot at the “Just Think: Teens Making Smart Choices” expo at Newton North High School, a gathering of many non-profit organizations that support teens and families in Newton and provide educational and prevention information and constructive activities. The Just Think attendees had fun driving our robot and catching the ball after it was launched. Newton mayor Ruthanne Fuller stopped by and took the robot for a spin, and a NewTV videographer filmed LigerBots team members talking about our robot and the expo.

After our intensive CADing session last weekend, the LigerBots were full of inspiration and excited to start building. Our team broke up into groups to work on basic elements of the robot and to continue the design process, as well as to write submissions to several FIRST awards, and plan future fundraising and STEM outreach efforts. Our new project planning system is keeping us super organized as we go.

We have decided to make a robot that will concentrate on placing milk-crate “cube” game pieces onto the “scale,” the tallest, see-saw-like goal in this year’s game. That means we need a way to pick up the cubes, lift them as high as eight feet, and release them onto one end of scale. We decided that the best way to accomplish this was to make a tall robot with an elevator system on metal rails.

Our students have created a mockup electrical control board, so we can start test driving our chassis even before we start adding the other mechanisms.

The programming group is writing a software framework to control all of the motors we will eventually build into the robot. We have cube intake and elevator prototypes and will be ready to finish building those mechanisms when parts arrive next week. We will get our parts very fast this year because many of our students have learned how to contribute to our formal purchasing system–just one of the many LigerBots skills we hope our team members will take with them to college and career.

We also improved our wood-working chops this year so that we could finish building playing field elements early in build season. We already have a replica of the scale and of the platform that will be used at the end of each robot game. Having our own field elements will allow us to practice the game right in the shop at Newton South High School once our robot is up and running.

We gathered during our six-hour Friday work session for our first team dinner of the season. We are grateful for the team parents who feed the LigerBots, get our students to our meetings and support all of the team’s projects.