Meeting Log 3/29

By Anuhya, Georgia, Trey, Gabriel, Ben, Cooper, and Paul

Task: Getting in some serious drive practice at Woodrow

We took some time out of our week to get in some drive practice at Woodrow so we would be able to practice working together with another team and collaborating with a make-shift alliance.

Drive Practice at Woodrow

Practice matches run: 16 The main purpose of our drive practice at Woodrow was getting drive practice with another team, the Mechanicats. This would be one of our only opportunities before UIL to practice with another team and play in a full practice field with another team working as an alliance. One of the challenges we faced today was with our drivers learning how to work together. There were many kinks with having two people drive, including having two separate controllers with their own unique functionalities. One controller deals with the intake inside the warehouse while the other deals directly with the alliance shipping hub and the arm. Learning how to collaborate while using both was a difficult obstacle to overcome, especially because we didn’t have as much drive practice overall as we would have liked. Another major challenge we faced was getting the team shipping hub to not tip over. Our arm would extend too low and it would tip over the team shipping hub if we weren’t careful. Right now, we are working on maneuvering so it doesn’t tip it over, or only slightly nudges it. We also started working on our duck game, because we realized we didn’t have our duck spinner as efficient as we would have liked. The band which held the duck spinner back from deploying early snapped when we were setting it up, so we had to make do while practicing.

Next Steps

We are planning on getting even more drive practice as the days progress and we’re getting closer to UIL. We also need to work on not tipping over the alliance shipping hub, because that is a major penalty and it also makes it nearly impossible to get any points afterwards. We also need to figure out how to “double duck” with our current duck spinner, meaning we have to spin the duck off the duck spinner and then deposit them in the alliance shipping hub. Trey is currently working on redesigning the duck spinner so it has a wider range of compliance. This is so we can maintain our goal of “double duck”, which needs a larger range of motion and a robot which can reach further. We also need to keep working on strategy, so we can finalize what we’re running with at UIL and have time to practice it.