This Week in FRC

Quarry Lane’s robotics team Tech Support is a third of the way through the build season of the FIRST Robotics Competition, and we’d love to share our progress with you!

Presented by The Boeing Company, 2022’s game Rapid React challenges us to create a robot that can pick up and shoot cargo into a scoring hub and be able to climb its way up as many as four ascending rungs. We’re so excited to share our progress in tackling this challenge!

Our robot breaks down to three main major mechanisms: the shooter, the intake, and the “hangar” for the monkey bar challenge. In order to traverse around the field to operate these though, we need a drivetrain. After much consideration of scoring positions, mobility, and field terrain, we’ve finished this part of the robot. Here’s a few highlights of our build process, as well as our finished drivetrain:

The final drivetrain:

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On top of the drivetrain, we’ll have the necessary mechanisms to score as many points as possible during the game. The intake mechanism will bring cargo into the robot. Here’s a few snapshots of our prototypes so far:

This is our newest prototype, with different types of wheels in specific locations. This is to make it so that we can take in a ball at any angle and still have it be centered for the shooter mechanism to shoot it into the scoring hub.

To shoot the cargo into the scoring hub, we’ve been testing out a few different types of intakes. The general premise is to use spinning wheels that will take in the cargo and have a structurer that will shoot it out into the scoring hub. Here are a few pictures that show this mechanism in action:

Our shooting mechanism is already capable of scoring into the upper hub (the top cylinder). Right now, we’re refining our program and vision systems for even more reliability to score from anywhere on the field and even while the robot is moving.

In the upcoming weeks, we plan to focus on developing the hanging mechanism and to continue refining the shooter and intake mechanisms.

Beyond the Quarry Lane community, we’ve been partnering with other FRC teams for friendly competitions and to help each other in any way we can! We plan on helping Monte Vista’s team with building their practice field and we’ve reached out to a first-year team in Orinda to offer support and mentorship.