Build season is finally under way! The game has been released and we are gearing up for our best season ever. FIRST Stronghold is a medieval themed game that includes tackling a variety of defenses to score in the opponent’s castle. We have broken up into design teams to theorize game strategy and possible design ideas. Everyone is excited to present their ideas later in the week and for the season as a whole.
The Kickoff for the 2016 FRC game, called Stronghold, is this Saturday at 10:30 AM EST. If you can not make it to an official event, you can watch it “live” via the website http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/news-feed/2016-first-robotics-competition-kickoff.
We are closing in on the final weeks before build season. The business team is continuing the heraldry brainstorm and are finalizing sponsor levels. The mechanical team finished the 2015 disassembly and is on the final stretch of finishing the rebuild of the 2014 robot. The robotic arm group is in the middle of construction and hopes to finish before the build season begins. The Ligerbots are looking forward to a great season and we would like to wish everyone a happy holiday.
This was a busy and productive week for the Ligerbots. Our awards team is deciding which awards we will be applying for and which students will be helping with each application. The business team talked about heraldry, an important part of this year’s game, and they also discussed the creation of sponsor levels. The three mechanical teams: 2014 rebuild, 2015 disassembly, and the robot arm, all made big strides this week towards finishing. Everyone has been doing great work and we are all excited for the start of build season.
Image processing systems for the Ligerbots have been lacking compared to a few other FIRST Robotics Competition teams in the past few years. Points gained in the short autonomous period given in each FRC game can be critical in determining team standings, and successful image processing is crucial for the robot during the autonomous period. This year we will be trying out one of these 1080p security cameras. Network protocol IP security cameras are a cost effective way for our team to integrate video versus going the GroPro route. It is difficult to tap in to the video stream using bluetooth or hdmi for a robotics build, and we hope to use this IP camera using its RTSP stream to access the video stream over the network. With this camera we hope to develop our image processing capabilities through the use of the OpenCV library or the LabView image processing module, and we hope to develop a successful image processing system for the upcoming FRC game. We will update this page later with our progress.