2nd Meeting with the Director of R&D at HOYA

By Aarav, Anuhya, Sol, Krish, Jai, Elias, and Fernando

Today, we had our second meeting this season with the Director of R&D at Hoya, Abhi Patnaik. This past weekend, Mr. Patnaik was able to attend the North Texas Regional Championship, where he watched our robot and many others in action. Our meeting today mainly consisted of a Q&A session where Mr. Patnaik asked us questions about choices we made on our robot, why we made them and possible solutions to problems he saw at the tournament.

The first question Mr. Patnaik asked us was about our intake. At the tournament, even when the Pixinerator tank tread was moving, it wouldn’t intake pixels or would only intake pixels from the left side. However, we had already solved this problem by using two intake servos as opposed to one intake servo, because our issue was due to the bottom intake plate not pushing into the playing field with enough force. He also recommended sanding the tip of our intake plate down like a knife so it sits completely flat to the playing field as opposed to at an angle.

He then asked us questions about our outtake and how confident we were in its ability to score pixels. We told him that this iteration of outtake was an incredibly new addition to the robot, and we were confident in the previous iteration and Scoopagon, specifically, but the changes we made, such as adding a new passive hinge, the Twist, as well as two new actuated hinges, the Lift and Wrist, were so we would have increased reliability and be able to score from more angles. He told us to pay attention to be careful about the amount of jerk on Outtake, especially because there are a lot of vibrations when it takes in pixels and deposits them onto the backdrop.

Finally, Mr. Patnaik commended us on our use of carbon fiber because it’s great at shock absorption and is very sturdy, which was a problem we had discussed in our previous meeting.

Main Takeaways:

The most important things he said to work on were to make sure our intake actually works, whether that means ensuring the 2 servos work or switching back to a 2mm aluminum bottom plate. Organizing cable management will also be very important, ensuring that we’re using the minimum viable wire length instead of having a lot of extra length on wires. We also need to account for inertia in our outtake.