This is a little late but here it goes. These past 4 years have been quite a wild ride for EVO Robotics. Pushing the boundaries again in our final year, we attempted a shifted from the traditional design paradigm for iRobotics. Instead of building using square tube framing, we went with a more customized primarily water jet frame. In addition, we attempted to decrease our foot print while maintaining our weight to increase maneuverability of a field with far more obstacles than the last 2 years. We also went back to the jump-drive design that we introduced to iRobotics, which again offers both agility and force when needed. We weighed in at 137lbs of our 140lbs weight limit, the heaviest our robot has ever been.
As far as our strategy for this year’s game, we went for going for all the game objects for this year’s game, both golf balls and foam balls.
Ultimately however we had a lot of major issues with migrating from our controls system we had used for the past 2 years. This new system was a shift away from WiFi which we had a lot of issues in the past 2 years, and a custom driver station that MuTan Clan put together. Shout out to Eric Johnson for making that happen. Despite these issues we were able to win our first elimination match.
In addition, we had some mechanical issues that presented themselves at the competition. Our manipulator functioned essentially as planned, but our drivetrain had a few major issues. Some of our drive sprockets and their respective tensioners had some misalignment issues. This added a significant amount of resistance in each drive module. With that in mind, our drive motors were strained and a lot of the torque went into overcoming these issues. The problem was so bad that drained our battery in 4 minutes of our 6 minute matches. This ultimately caused our downfall in the match we were eliminated.
Though we didn’t win this year, we hope we inspire future teams to push themselves to build robots of high caliber, featuring aesthetic superiority, space efficiency, in addition to robust functionality.
