Robotics Team Completes Robot
“Ihear smells!” The phrase was not uncommon in the last hours of the robotics build season, which wrapped up on Tuesday the 21st. Although the team isn’t allowed to work directly on the robot anymore, they can continue to build mechanisms and program on their practice bot Rasputin.
“This year’s task is to collect whiffle balls and shoot them into a low and high goal,” explained junior Sydney S. “Additionally, we need to collect large plastic gears (about 1.5 ft in diameter) and hook them onto a peg. Finally, at the end of the match, the robot needs to climb up a rope and press a button.”
Sydney worked mostly on the lidar (laser rangefinder) mount and the mechanism that helps the 120 pound robot climb a rope.
“The trigonometry that I learned last year in math class was very useful during the design process,” she said. Sydney also mentioned that the skills she has learned from robotics in the iLab have helped her with art fabrication and workshops.
Although she hasn’t taken on a leadership role, Sydney says there are many opportunities to participate in different parts of the team.
The coolest part of the Nueva FRC team is how independent they are: they have truly created a self-sufficient system where older students mentor younger students so our role as teachers and adults almost become superfluous, which is the best result as a team mentor!
In order to complete the robot, the 60-person robotics team had to come to terms with the challenge of teaching, creating, designing, testing, adjusting, and finishing a robot.
“The coolest part of the Nueva FRC team is how independent they are: they have truly created a self-sufficient system where older students mentor younger students so our role as teachers and adults almost become superfluous, which is the best result as a team mentor!” said Connie L, a team mentor.
Team members dedicated themselves to reaching a final product, spending three hours after school multiple days a week and seven hours on weekends to work towards completion.
Two junior team members have commented about the tremendous improvement they have seen between this year and the previous year.
“I think that our robot this year is easily our team’s best yet; we can score in every way the rules specify, a first for us,” says Andrew Z. “Our robot is a synthesis of thousands of person-hours coming from both the most experienced engineers on our team and from those we trained in robotics only a few months earlier. Regardless of our results at competition, this build season has already been an excellent send-off to our team’s seniors and an exciting sign of what lies ahead.”
