FRC 2022-2023
Building a FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) robot for the 2022-2023 competition season.
Skills
Onshape
Metalworking
Java
Timeline
Jan-Mar 2023
6 weeks
Team Leads
Sumrath Pahwa
Anna Jordan
Emily Hur
The Competition
FRC's definition of the competition is: "Under strict rules and
limited time and resources, teams of high school students are
challenged to build industrial-size robots to play a difficult
field game in alliance with other teams, while also
fundraising to meet their goals, designing a team “brand,” and
advancing respect and appreciation for STEM within the local
community."
The 2023 challenge can be found
here.
Our Robot
Our robot consists of 4 swerve drive modules on an aluminum chassis that has a telescope with a claw on it for scoring,
and an intake that drops down to pick up game pieces off the ground. A video of our robot in action can be found here.
The strengths of our robot were:
- The swerve drive allowed for fast, precise movements across the field.
- Our telescoping claw made scoring easy and reliable.
- Our intake allowed for fast piece pickup "touch it own it" style.
CAD
The image to the left is the CAD of the top of our claw, which was milled on a CNC out of polycarbonate. This claw had two compliant wheels with a brushed motor controlling them. This claw also had a pneumatic piston that allowed for the arms to "open" and "close" allowing for the claw to manipulate game pieces of varying sizes and shapes.
Manufacturing
We divided the construction of our robot into several groups, with one group focusing on the drivetrain, another on the telescope and structure, and a third on the claw and intake. The drivetrain consisted of a CNC aluminum and polycarb bellypan attached to 4 SDS MK4 Swerve Modules. The telescope was purchased from The Thrifty Bot and then modified for our needs. The intake and claw were designed in house and made out of CNC polycarb.
Electrical
FRC robotics has its own electrical system, with a device called a Power Distribution Hub (PDH, Orange) in charge of distributing the power to the SPARK maxes that controlled our NEO motors. The code and processing of our robot was done on a device called a RoboRIO, which is the gray rectangle located under the PDH. We also have a hub that controls our pnuematics and our radio.
Reflection
This was my final year of high school, and my second year of being the president of the FRC team. My first year as president, my junior year, there was a lot of knoweldge drop on how to build a FRC robot due to COVID, which made that year more of a rebuilding year for our team. This year, however, I was able to apply the various things that I learned during my junior year, from robot design and construction, to team and finance management. I believe I was successfully able to apply what I learned, as we won the 2023 Glen Allen regional event!