Week 1: Progress Report

Today is the start of Week 2 of the 2011 FIRST Robotics season. After one week on the job, our team is hard at work getting prepared for what is sure to be the tough road ahead of them. Many of our teams, such as CAD and Electric, haven't had much work yet, but other teams have already made considerable progress in just the first week.

Fabrication

Fabrication has already built two separate chassis: one 6-wheeled tankdrive (above), and one 4-wheeled Mecanum drive (right). This 6

wheeler is more robust, while the Mecanum drive obviously provides more maneuverability.

We built both frames for testing, in order to decide which we want to use for our actual bot.

Next week... Fabrication plans complete the construction of our model scoring rack (below)

for testing.

Programing

With no running bot to test, Programing has used the first week to focus on a unique control system. For the past few years, our team has always wanted to create a Power Glove (below) to drive our robot, in hopes of winning the "Innovation in Control" award. We just recently obtained software that could properly run our potentiometer. The power glove controller would use the potentiometer to interpret movements of the fingers as an alternate form of input.

Next week... Our programming guru Ezra plans to teach some of the newer members the basics of programming with Lab View.

Electronics

Using our previous designs, Electronics created an electronics board for our Mecanum chassis.

Next week... Electronics plans to make an electronic board for our 6 wheel chassis.

Safety

This week, Andrew took the team through a short safety tour, briefing us on all of the tool in our workshop.

Next week... Andrew plans to put a short power point presentation together on safety.

CAD

Using SketchUp, one of our mentors, Mr. Mosher, created a model of the playing field for us. Once the team has decided on a final design, the CAD team will be in charge of making a virtual model of our bot, and the virtual playing field will help us figure out a

ll of the dimensions.

Next week... Once the team has tested our two

chassis and determined our final design, the CAD team will finally get to start modeling it.

The team has gotten off to a good start, but there's still a lot of work to be done. This year, the team has a new organization system. The team is split up into different groups, each with its own area of expertise. This really helped, creating a focused, productive working environment. Hopefully, this will be the start of another great season.