Hoya Meeting 2025/01/28

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

Task: Present to Director of Research and Development from HOYA

Today we had a meeting with the Director of Research and Development at HOYA. We discussed our robot’s design and updated him on this season’s challenge. Specifically, we spoke about our past versions for Sample and Speciminer, our current design, and our future robot. We finalized our presentation with a detailed report on our current progress of the design of our swerve model and our new chassis.

We received a lot of feedback on our presentation skills and how to make it a smoother operation. Our mentor made a useful analogy and talked to us about how our whole team is a second “robot” that must function in unison to achieve greatness. He encouraged us to run more dry matches on the field so that the driver can perfect their maneuvering skills and decrease loop times. He also told us to spend time perfecting the portfolio presentation by going over it several times to make sure it flows smoothly. On the more technical side, we discussed weight balancing issues that will arise on the new iteration of the robot. The problem that we found is that we want to keep the robot as light as possible so it can properly ascend, but we need more weight in the front so there are not any weight balancing issues in the front and back of the robot. We showed one of our solutions to fixing this problem would be placing our battery in the front of the chassis to counterbalance the weight of the arms on the back. Our mentor also suggested we look at other engineering companies such as EPSIN to see how they fix their imbalanced weight issues. Another part of the robot we discussed was structural integrity of the linear slide arms. Our mentor brought up the point that our arms may sometimes wobble which would make scoring harder and also give strain on some sensors. Our solution we presented was that we switched back to making belted linear slides that help solve the wobble issue that used to occur.

We gained a lot of insight on how to improve our team organization and presentation skills as well as ways we can fix some technical problems on our robot. We really appreciated the advice and can not wait to meet with him again.