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Rover Ruckus

In Rover Ruckus, the playing field had a space lander in the middle.  Robots could latch on to this and lift themselves up.  They had to be able to get down, latch back up, recognize "minerals" (gold and silver represented by gold color cubes and silver colored balls), and be able to gather them, two at a time, and place them into different bins in the lander.  Robots also had to be park partially in a crater.

Here is a summary.  The engineering notebook PDF has an extensive description of everything.

September-October: Wasted a lot of time on building a 6-wheeled chassis.  Why 6 wheels?  Not sure.  Maybe we were subconsciously obsessed with the NASA Mars rovers.  Or we read somewhere that a 6 wheeled chassis was great for some things.  Anyway, for this challenge, it was unnecessary, and luckily, less than a week before our first competition we saw the light and switched to a regular 4 wheel chassis with omni wheels.  We also designed an arm with a collector that could sweep in balls, and a lift with a servo mechanism that could deliver the balls into the lander.  We came in 6th out of 32 teams in our very first competition and were picked by an alliance for the semi-finals.  Not bad.

November-January: Stoked by our good performance, we decided to completely redesign the robot.  I was dying to install the mecanum wheels that had come in a week before the first qualifier but we had no time to design and 3D print an adapter for it to work with our hex shafts and extrudes.  Now we did that and changed the chassis to mecanums. This allows the robot to move in any direction without needing to turn.  We also redesigned the arm to be able to extend, gather, and deliver the minerals without needing a separate lift.  All of this was challenging to get right, and our second qualifier sucked.  We had a lot of glitches and couldn't quite hit our stride.

January-February: We had 3 weeks to fix a bunch of things.  We froze any more redesigns and instead refined what we had, and fix everything.  We also greatly improved our autonomous performance.  In the 3d qualifier, we finished 4th out of 32, and got to be a 3d seed alliance captain.  However, we couldn't win our semi-finals matches, but still our robot did well.  It was a good way to finish the season.

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