Meeting with Texas Tech

By Aarav, Anuhya, Jai, Sol, Ren, Nalin, and Fernando

Task: Present to Texas Tech Mechanical Engineering Student

Today we met with a current mechanical engineering student from Texas Tech to discuss several important things like our progress through this season, the current robot, and the future version of our robot.

After explaining the basic structure of this season’s game, we divided straight into talking about the current iteration of the robot. First, we showed the chassis and talked about how it is not optimized for this season since it was meant for last year’s game, but how it still works as a starter chassis. Our mentor liked the idea of the sampler since it does not require driver precision and is efficient when built properly. We used the latest version of our sampler to show how sometimes we rush the building and testing processes which inevitably leads to inadequate subsystems. Some problems that arose due to rushing were the color sensor being mounted incorrectly and the beater bar being too stiff of rushing the build. Our mentor helped us learn the importance of testing by telling us his own experiences and encouraged us to do more robot testing so mistakes like axons breaking do not occur. However, we did show our team’s problem solving skills by showing how we were able to make the new version of the beater bar functional. We then discussed our progress with the linear slides (and how it was able to defeat our coach at a game of tug and war), and our mentor liked the build and design of the linear slides. The team also presented the progression of our shoulder from the REV rail bridge to the worm gearbox, and the professional we met with complemented our idea to use the gearbox.

After discussing the problems with our current robot and receiving advice on what we could change, we recapped the three meets we have had so far and the impacts they had on our team. We showed statistics like average looping times and points scored as well as talking about how our team organization is a little rough sometimes because our code team always receives very minimal time to code the robot. We talked about how meet 3 being cancelled was something that would hurt our team since meets are the way where we can truly see how well we are performing and what level of performance we are on compared to other teams.

Finally, we showed CAD models of the future robot and talked about how it is a swerve chassis with a sampler and specieminer attached to it. We showed several different versions of the speciminor and its development to the current version. We also broke down the swerve module and showed how it was going to function as the wheels for our drivetrain to give us more mobility. Some of the main problems that the team discussed with the metro was how to balance the weight since most of it is on one side of the robot where the arms are located. This weight imbalance can lead to tipping especially when both the arms are fully vertical.

In this meeting, we gained important insight that will help us make several different improvements to our current and future robot. We really appreciated meeting with our mentor and can not wait to meet with Texas Tech again!