EVO Could Catch Them All!

This past season has been one of tremendous growth for EVO Robotics. Since this was a brand new game it required a brand new strategy and mechanism for the challenge at hand. This lead to a variety of changes within our robot’s mechanical construction and we’ve learned from this experience. In our past 2 years we’ve experimented with non traditional drivetrains and we weren’t about to change that up this year. We constructed what we called “H-drive” which is again an omni-directional drive train. It features an all omniwheel “tank” set up with 2 omni’s in the center perpendicular to the standard drive. This offers us a sideways vector. This year also features our first welded frame. The learning curve for this task was very steep, but one of our members, Sasha, was able to pick it up very quickly and made our robot look the best it’s ever been. Learning a thing or two from last year about complexity, we’ve decided to only score the main objective for this year’s game golf balls!

During the first day of the competition, we had our drivers hone their skills in grabbing the small golf balls efficiently around the field and maneuvering through the tunnels equal skill. You could say we could catch them all. We were among the most efficient scorers of the competition. We had to do a bit of last minute engineering with regards to our method of opening the tunnels because our initial idea of using magnets proved ineffective, so we substituted 2 bolts to pull the pins out.

During the last day of competition, we made it through our first elimination match with ease despite experiencing some Wi-fi interference. Our second elimination match started by far the best of the entire competition. By the drivers had gotten their routine down, they swept up the first 3 golf balls and scored all of them in the first minute of the match. They quickly maneuvered through the tunnel to the second zone to grab more balls. That’s when disaster struck. An opponent decided to disable themselves right in front of our way back. We though not too much of it, we’d simply make our way through the course opening 2 more tunnels, but our last minute engineering had failed us and one of our bolts had bent. We were helpless for the last half of that match and naturally another team managed to score more than us toward the last minute of the match.

EVO has definitely come very far these past 3 years, and we have become yet another year wiser. We’re ready for senior year, but can the rest of the the teams handle our last EVOlution?