About
The Game
Team Abilities
Robot Name
Fun Lore
- One team asked us if our arm was invertible, because sometimes it would spontaneously flip to the other side when the encoder lost signal
- Meme video from 2018
The Robot
Melia was a double jointed arm that was designed to pick up cubes and place them at either the switch or scale to score points. The robot could score on either side of itself for the high scale placements by inverting it’s wrist joint, though it primarily scored on the scale backwards.
Mechanical Design
Drive Train
This was our first year of using a West Coast Drive style of drive train. It allowed us to have a lot more access to the wheels on the robot to be able to do quicker maintenance with any issues there were.
This was also our first robot to not have a dropped center wheel. We still opted for 6wd, but no drop center to reduce instability when the arm was all the way up. To allow us to turn we used Omni Wheels on the outer corners of the robot.
Originally the robot had the drive gearbox on the center wheel of the gearbox, however we moved it to the front of the robot to counterbalance the arm on the back of the robot to make the robot more stable while driving and moving the arm. After we did this move, the motors on the gearbox sort of became a hard stop for the intake when the arm came down, and after repeated use the gearboxes on the drive slightly bent from this collision. It never seemed to drastically effect the performance of the drive, but surely it didn’t help.