2024-2025 Season
High Stakes

Pre Season:

Objective:

This year's game had a number of stakes (posts) to score on, ranging from movable hexagonal stakes, to fixed stakes at different levels of elevation attached to the walls. In addition, any movable goal put into the positive corners would double the score of the goals, while the negative corners would negate them (2v2). We needed a robot that could excel in both the skills challenge (one robot) and the 2v2 challenge (two robots v two robots). In the pre-season, we tested out a lot of ideas and prototypes.

Brainstorming process:

We researched a prior game with similarly shaped elements from long ago. However, with vastly different rules and scoring priorities, and upgraded electronics and hardware, we decided to make a design we hadn't seen before. We designed six motors on the drive base to be able to move around the field quickly, geared for the best combination of acceleration, pushing force, and top speed. We used a diagonal conveyor that hooks to quickly carry the rings from the ground onto the mobile stakes clamped to the back of the robot. Uniquely, we decided to add a mechanism that redirects the rings from the intake into a hopper on the lift, so we could score on the fixed elevated wall stakes.

Assembly:

Assembly of the drive base went smoothly. By splitting up the work, our team was able to build the redirect mechanism, and the conveyor very quickly. The conveyor was difficult to build. We cycled through several different Lexan shapes to maximize the ability to pick up the rings before settling on a triangular hook shape. Additionally, it took a fair amount of trial and error to get the back tilter to line up with the conveyor. In order to build the back clamp, we needed to use a complicated pneumatics system. Finally, we used proportional, integral, and derivative feedback control to effectively code the robot and make the autonomous driving very precise.

Results:

The Mall of America Signature event in Minnesota was the first competition of the year across the world, so nobody knew how the game would be played and which strategies would work. Our robot functioned well in the skills challenge, earning us 7th place in the tournament and 12th place in the world at the time. We learned a lot in the 2v2 matches to improve our robot and determine which strategies worked. Our autonomous code for the first 15 seconds was instrumental to winning, but it was inconsistent, causing us to lose many matches.

Full robot

Redirect mechanism to front hopper

Early Season:

Objective:

Given our performance at the last competition, we learned that the most important winning factor was to be able to score very quickly. The wall stakes were hard to score on with our last robot but this strategy could result in an advantage over other teams that didn't have a mechanism for them. Additionally, we needed to build a stronger pneumatic clamp to give us a better hang on the mobile stakes.

Brainstorming:

Since the back mobile stake clamp was too inconsistent, we decided to redesign it for maximum clamping strength by using a class 1 lever with three short pneumatic pistons so we would never drop a mobile stake. Additionally, we completely rebuilt our intake system. We simplified it by making our redirect mechanism use the reversal of the motor after a ring passed a one-way hatch to go into the front scoring hopper. Our old redirect mechanism was too unreliable and slow.

Assembly Process

First, we rebuilt the entire intake system. We chose to make the front intake wider so we could get discs from a larger area. We made the hook chain go twice as fast and made it closer to the front intake to get faster cycle time. Additionally, we added a scoop so that we could intake the bottom ring, grabbing it out from under a stack of rings in the corner.

For the rest of the intake system, one of the largest problems was managing the different ring colors. We only wanted to score our own color (either blue or red depending on the match), so we added a color sorting system that used sensors to distinguish and then eject the wrong color ring as it went around the top of the intake. Additionally, this ring color detection system was used to coordinate when the intake was going to spin backwards into the front hopper so that we could score on the wall stakes. The hopper was put on a 6 bar lift to allow it to sit compactly inside the confines of our robot when collapsed, and stick out high and far enough to score on wall stakes.

We modified the clamping mechanism to have twice the amount of force on the mobile stakes so that we would never drop a goal and so that the extremely important mobile stake alignment would stay consistent for the intake.

We added a pneumatic deployed hanging mechanism that would pop up on top of the robot so that when we drove into the hanging bar at speed at the end of the match, the bar would settle into a notch with the robot half an inch above the ground.

Results:

Success! Our team performed extremely well at the Highlander National Signature Event. We placed seventh overall in qualification matches with a record of 6-2. In the elimination rounds we were the sixth seed but after winning six consecutive and the best of three finals, we came out on top as Tournament Champions! This win qualified us for VEX Worlds 2025 in Dallas, TX. Even so, there were still a few improvements that could be made, especially since we were still in the early season. Our intake design was not fast enough so we looked for new variations to continue to improve and produced a string of modified and improved robots for the duration of the season.

Mid-Season

We continued to evolve the design, building next gen robots for regional and state competitions, despite already being qualified for Worlds. Our intake design was not fast enough so we looked for new variations. We rebuilt the drive base to a more compact design and switched to a different intake system as the redirect mechanism on the last robot was fast enough for competitions but not for skills.

Learning from each previous autonomous skills attempts, we added more sensors in the form of horizontal and vertical tracking wheels to use in combination with an inertial sensor to track global field position. This allowed for more accurate autonomous runs.

Late-Season

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