Over the last week the entire team has been busy analyzing the challenges involved with this years unique game.
One group has been testing the 2020 robot to see how suitable it is for the challenges this year as they differ from our planned game strategy last year. We have found that our current robot is capable of shooting at all ranges required. For the accuracy challenge and can score all 15 balls in a minute for the speed shooting challenge. They have also continued to gather data about the accuracy of the shooter at different ranges and fly-wheel speeds.
Drive base group has been practicing driving a tank drive base around courses similar to the ones for the speed driving challenges and have seen large improvements in their skill at maneuvering and driving the robot, with an over 30% decrease in average times.
Unfortunately the 2019 swerve drive base has had some problems which have prevented it from being tested and used to train on. However these problems have now been resolved and should be used in the next few weeks to train with and to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of our most recent swerve drive version over a tank drive base.
Due of COVID-19 we were unable to run our usual training days to get rookies up to speed in fundamental STEM skills. These include design fundamentals, introduction to CAD with onshape and basic programming with python. At the same time the software veterans were experimenting with fiducial trackers, which are unique identifiers than can be recognized by our vision system to find our position on the field which can improve our autonomous driving and turret alignment.
Swerve has been iterating on their current design to fix some of the design and manufacture issues of the previous version which caused issues such as binding in our worm gear arrangement for the swerve drive. .
The team also recently got a 3d printer working in the workshop which they are using to manufacture and prototype many parts such as an encoder mount for swerve and battery indicators to make battery management easier.