Hello! It’s the week after bag day, and we are well into building our second robot.

The Design subteam has been working with Mechanical to resolve imperfections that have been found while building the second robot. These solutions have to be lightweight and easy to install, due to the shortened time period that we will have to fix things at the tournament. The Mechanical subteam has been building the second robot which will be used for practicing by the drive team.  They have assembled the lift and gear manipulator for the second robot and they have mounted the gear manipulator. Once they finish the rest of the structure, they will hand the robot off to the Controls subteam. In the meantime, Controls has been preparing for the upcoming competition season by repairing the second control board and by organizing their new tool cart. Programming has been working on the autonomous code, specifically planning out and implementing sequences. They also prepared our swerve drive for one of the demonstrations that we did. In addition to this, they have begun programing the vision to identify the targets on the airship. Scoutagy has continued to develop their analysis tools for the scouting database. Chairman’s has been working on the Judges’ packet and Spec Sheet, both of which will be given out at our competitions to judges and visitors. Media has been helping Chairman’s with some basic data gathering and proofreading. They have also been writing these posts and tweeting.

But it hasn’t been only robotic progress that we’ve been making. On Saturday, we picked a name for our robot. Following in the team tradition of naming our robots after Greek and Roman gods, we have chosen the name Aergia. We chose this name because she is the daughter of Æther and Gaia, both of which have been successful robots for our team in previous years, with Æther helping us win the 2013 Lake Superior Regional and Gaia helping us win the 2015 Wisconsin and Midwest Regionals.

Before we sign off today, CORE would like to thank the good people at Power/Mation, who tonight gave us a donation so that we can continue to build robots and travel to competitions. We would also like to thank another sponsor, MSOE, who sent a representative to talk to us about how our futures as engineers could be helped by attending MSOE.

We have gotten a lot done so far and we hope to get even more done in the next week. Until then, have a great week and keep checking back here for more updates about the team.