This year's competition...

Infinite Recharge

On January 4th, 2020 the team held its Kickoff meeting, where each member anxiously awaited the announcement for the new challenge for this year: Infinite Recharge. This year's challenge takes place on FIRST City, a futuristic city modeled after Star Wars, where an asteroid strike is about to attack the city. Alliances must work together to energize the shield with the Power Cells, activate the Shield Generator with the Control Panel, and finally return back under the safety of the Shield before the match ends.

The matches will last just 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and in the first 15 seconds the robots will be under autonomous control to energize the Shield Generator. For the rest of the match, human players will take over and manually control the robots. At the end of the match, the alliance that has scored the most points when completing the objectives will win! Come watch our team compete from March 7-8 at the Week 2 Bethesda, MD Qualifier Event!

• If you want to watch the INFINITE RECHARGE Game Animation, Click Here

• If you want to read more about INFINITE RECHARGE, Click Here

• If you want to see the teaser video, Click Here

Our Progress So Far

This season's competition has seen a dramatic rule change, in that there is no longer a bag day. Traditionally, this was the day all teams must stop building their robots, but with the removal of this rule teams can build up until the day of their event. This means we've been taking more time to CAD and design our robot and its components so we can deliver our best effort at Qualifiers!

Components

• High Goal Shooter
• Color Panel Control Wheel
• Telescoping Climber

Shooting Mechanism

This is the basic CAD design of our shooting mechanism. It was created on its own so that we could see the specifications of slope and time accelerating that would affect the ball's exit.

Color Wheel

This is the color wheel control panel that our team's robot must dexterously manipulate to advance Shield Generator stages. A critical goal if we want to be competitive in the late-stage matches.

Climbing Mechanism

The climbing mechanism is looking to be the most important mechanism in this season's competition, as it will not only help us gain lots of game points, it will also help us earn vital ranking points.

On the left is the CAD design for our climbing mechanism. It will help our just over 2 ft robot climb and hang from a bar over 3 ft above it. On the right is our field prop for the hanging bar that we constructed using the given model dimensions.

Chassis Design

The basic structure was designed to incorporate our different mechanisms in the most streamlined, space-efficient manner possible.

Field Design

This year's competition is heavily centered around how our robot can maneuver and interact with different, highly varied field elements, which is why we built every prop we could to have a proper field setup.

Programming

As any robotics team will tell you, no matter how good the design and construction of a robot is, if the programming isn't good the robot won't perform. Luckily for us, we have an amazing team of programmers that help our robot achieve new heights. Shown here are the two officers of our Programming and Electronics sub-teams coding a new mechanism.

Our team hard at work

Testing the color wheel mechanism and checking electronics

Here at RoboLoCo the students are careful to keep the unused robots caged and locked to help prevent skynet related incidents.

Prototypes Have Arrived!

RoboLoCo's latest prototype for its CAN PCB has arrived.

One of the raw boards...

Action Shot

The board below has the screw terminals soldered on and is mounted in a brand new 3d printed PCB holder.

It features room for up to 24 connections per board PLUS a shield. The shield, misleading marked as "ground", is intended for use when shielded twisted pair cabling is in use. The shield hooks to the "ground" connection while the twisted pair hooks to the "high" and "low".

The shield/ground can be grounded. Although doing so on a FRC legal robot represents a slight risk in terms of shorts causing other problems. Mainly around inspection time when the chassis is tested to ensure it's not connected to either the positive or negative rails on the electrical system.

This is what happens to FRC rubber wheels when spinning fast enough...

As pointed out over at Chief Delphi, it's important to note that this sort of experiment should only be tried under controlled conditions. The risk of this type of wheel breaking apart is very high.