UTD Qualifier Build Post Mortem

By Trey

Task: Review our failure of rushed build leading up to the UTD qualifier

As discussed in the post "Making the Ringevator Legal" there was a lot of rushed build leading up to this qualifier. As a recap of that post, the Ringevator was too wide and too tall to be legal, so we had to cut off the front of the robot, split the omni wheels, shorten the assembly, and shorten the belt. For more information, read that post. So with all of this change leading up to the competition, one would expect that it all worked out.

Alas, it did not. By the end of the raised build, the robot was still not legal by any means. In fact, the ringevator had to be removed so that we could actually run matches with a legal robot. This, however, is not the end. Even though the robot may not be legal, the judges still respected the development we displayed in our journal and portfolio. We demonstrated real development in innovative systems that I suppose resonated with the judges because we were awarded the Inspire award. Ordinarily, any team would see this as a big accomplishment but the builders at IronReign were restless. We failed our goals. The end objective with building a good robot is to score high amounts of points and that’s the one thing we didn’t do.

At the very least we did learn quite a bit from the situation. Firstly, the troubles we had with the ring transfer from intake to outtake demonstrated that the pancake flipper was not a good idea. Such a path for ring transfer would be cool but a challenge too large for the coders. Besides, we already have put so much into the ringevator. Abandoning it now would be reckless. We also discovered that another pivot point at the bottom would be vital to the ring transfer. At the moment this is just a REV core hex motor but something more advanced would be helpful. There is also the added possibility of adding a slide to the bottom of the intake which paired with the current pivots, would make the intake far more versatile and clear of the spin of the turntable, which gets caught. There is still much thinking to be done in this department. Finally, the last thing we learned is that the ringevator would need to be remade in a fully custom, aluminum version to make it fit in the sizing cube. This will be a large feat but if we can do it, we will have points when our next qualifier rolls around.

Next Steps

We’re going to need to do a lot more before our robot scores real points. I admire our progress but we still have a long way to go. We need to step up on driver practice, reevaluate the ringevator, and start thinking about a final version of the robot. What comes immediately next is modeling and redesigning the ringevator to lose any bulk in the system so it can fit on the robot. I hope that those new developments will allow us to run matches next competition.