Parts & Wreck – First Robot Progress Update – Fall 2020

Parts & Wreck – First Robot Progress Update

We are this year’s Freshman Combotics team and we got a great start into our robot designing this semester. We spent the first few meetings figuring out what weapon type we wanted, and in a close race between a vertical spinner and a drum spinner, we opted for the drum spinner because of its simplicity, wide range of attack, and constant attacks over the vertical spinners’ more powerful attacks.

With our weapon figured out, we split up into three sub-teams: weapon, electronics, and chassis. The weapon team’s had two main challenges—having the body of the weapon machined on only one surface and keeping it under 9lbs.



They arrived at this design, which allows for a high moment of inertia while staying light and only needs to be cut on one side. We went through a multitude of iterations to get to this design, including the more traditional drum spinners below which we found to be too heavy unless we reduced the MOI or attack range.



As for the electronics team, they worked with our upper-level members in iRobotics to find the best electronics for our robot. After picking them up, they were sent to our chassis team who worked on a top-down sketch with the components included in it.



The chassis team was able to figure out general dimensions of the robot through this, and moved onto creating a 3D CAD of our robot. The CAD model below is the start to this 3D CAD.



Moving forward, the weapon team will be working on the pulley mechanism that drives our drum spinner, and the chassis team is working on angling the front of the chassis and polishing it overall. We are proud of our progress so far and are hoping to get into the assembly of our robot by mid-February.