FIRST Robotics - Rapid React (2022, Age 16)

Every year, our robotics team builds a new robot from scratch, and this year was no exception. For the 2022 season, we opted to have a robot that could both climb up the “hangar”, a four-bar contraption with what amounts to monkey bars- up seven and a half feet into the air- and shoot “cargo”- this year’s lingo for a slightly fuzzy ball- into a glorified bucket, called the hub.

Our robot would climb with the four arms pictured, carefully lifting itself off the ground, and then crawling one-by-one across the bars of the hangar until it reached the top rung. Additionally, our ball handler- also pictured- would intake cargo and attempt to shoot it into the higher of the two hubs. I say would with a bit of hesitance, as that was our intention.

My part of this whole thing was the chassis, the very thing holding up the arms and the ball handler, partially obscured in the photos by our bumper and sponsors. As the Systems Engineer for the chassis, I was responsible for specifying, communicating, testing, and verifying the abilities and compliance of the chassis to our internal standards and the 2022 Rapid React rulebook¹. Additionally, my role had an aspect of project management, as I was also responsible for keeping the rest of the chassis team, including the dedicated hardware and electrical team, doing what is best for our timetable and our robot.

As it turns out, climbing is hard, and the task of handling cargo is deceptively tricky. Issues were had with the climbers- especially with limit switch damage and driver control issues- in addition to jams, hardware weirdness, and software issues with the ball handler.

We competed with our robot at the 2022 Del Mar Regional² in San Diego.

Water game? Please no. Climbing was hard enough, I rather not swim.

¹A 136-page behemoth of a document brimming with riveting content such as the specifications for the alliance walls (not the hangar walls, those are different walls), or all of page 31 dedicated to the finest details of the mostly-useless launch pad. Although I make fun of it for being a dry technical document, it has a notion of humor- my favorite being rule G205 on page 52, “This isn’t combat robotics”.

²”Don’t know how to turn off your WiFi hotspot? Ask a teenager!”