Taurus (1073)
From FIRSTwiki
Taurus was the robot built by Team 1073 in 2005 for Triple Play. The team developed their most ambitious design yet, all the while sporting their new blue and white tie-dye shirts and under the primary leadership of senior members.
Contents |
Pre-build
Before the season began, the previous team coach retired, leaving leadership responsibilities to four mentors known as the "Three Amigos" (the fourth joined after the term was coined). Even so, without a definite leadership role, the team risked collapse as the Amigos all represented differing parts of the team. It was through student leadership and seniors taking up the mantle of management that the team not only survived, but prevailed.
Build
Team FORCE learned from its experiences during the previous year about how to go about designing the robot and the Design team was given full clearance to design the robot with only essential input from the Strategy team, which proved to be vastly better for everyone involved. Given the challenge of the game, Design rose to it and developed a robot far more ambitious than the previous two designs. A major component was the use of pneumatics, which would figure heavily into the new design. By the end of the first week, a concept had been created and the entire team was on track with a design to work with.
While the Controls team created a new control interface and a color-sensing camera to seek the vision tetra, the Design team plowed ahead at a blistering pace and created a CAD model of the entire robot in record time. The season was off to a fantastic start, perhaps even the goal of building a full-size practice robot could be met. Alas, that was not to be the case: the winter of 2005 turned out to be particularly brutal and five days were lost due to snow days during school, which thus prohibit extracurricular activities. Nevertheless, the team made do with what time was available and built a complete robot faster than ever before. However, disaster struck one evening while testing the robot's pneumatics and arm-lifting mechanics when the cast-iron elbow gear broke a few teeth, rendering itself worthless. Fortunately, one of the selfless mentors braved a blizzard for several hours to purchase stainless steel replacements in Massachusetts.
The robot was completed on time, but the snow days caused such a delay as to effectively prevent any practice before it was shipped. Considering how much more complicated this robot was than in previous years, the practice day during the competition would be even more valuable than before.
Accomplishments
Manchester Regional 2005
general description of how it went
- Seeding
- Elimination rounds
Awards
Robot
For Triple Play, team came up with a design that included more actuators than ever before and pneumatics. A very tall robot was designed, standing close to the maximum 60 inches in its folded position. During gameplay, the robot, named Taurus because it resembled a bull while folded, would unfold using a 24-inch pneumatic cylinder attached to an arm at its "shoulder." A motor at its "elbow" would continue the motion, extending a grabber mechanism at its "wrist," which was also articulated with a pneumatic cylinder. The grabber itself used a third cylinder to open and close PVC-covered claws, used to pick up tetras during the game (it was these claws that gave the robot its bull-like appearance while folded). Fully extended, the robot could reach eleven feet in the air! During the competition, it became clear that the grabber mechanism was not working as intended, partially due to the lack of practice after numerous snow days in the weeks before. The grabber was removed and replaced with a simple hook cobbled together of former grabber pieces. This proved to be very helpful and helped allow the team to finish 15th out of 51 teams.
Robot Functions
- Pneumatic lifting for raising tetras
- Pneumatic grabber for grasping tetras
- Two drive wheels and two casters for manueverability
Robot Strategy
- Stack up to two tetras at one time
- Pick up tetras from human player
- Pick up tetras off the ground
- Manueverability
- Stability
