Game Discription

Two teams of three ro­bots each com­pete against each other. They go in coun­ter­clock­wise cir­cles around a cen­ter me­dian, while car­ry­ing large “Track­balls” over and un­der over­passes for ex­tra points

Official Game Rules

FIRST Over­drive is played on a 54′ x 27′ track di­vided by a fence into a Red side and a Blue side. The fence is crossed by an over­pass mark­ing the red and blue fin­ish lines. Two three-team al­liances race around the track in a counter clock­wise di­rec­tion ma­nip­u­lat­ing Track­balls. The game is made up of two scor­ing pe­ri­ods. The first 15 sec­onds of play is the Hy­brid pe­riod in which ro­bots are au­tonomous, and may also re­spond to dig­i­tal sig­nals sent by team Robo­coaches sta­tioned at the cor­ners of the track. Dur­ing the Hy­brid pe­riod, ro­bots trav­el­ing in a counter clock­wise di­rec­tion score:

• 8 points for each of their Trackballs knocked off of or passed over the overpass
• 4 points whenever their robot crosses a line on the track
• 2 points whenever their trackball crosses their finish line

The next two min­utes of play is the Tele­op­er­ated pe­riod. At this time, ro­bots are ra­dio con­trolled by team op­er­a­tors stand­ing at ei­ther end of the field. Dur­ing the Tele­op­er­ated pe­riod, ro­bots trav­el­ing in a counter clock­wise di­rec­tion score:

• 2 points whenever their robot or Trackball crosses their finish line
• 8 points whenever their Trackball passes over their overpass

Al­liances score an ad­di­tional 12 points for each of their Track­balls that are po­si­tioned any­where on the over­pass at the end of the match.

Menu

• Our Robot
• Our Success
• Other Components

Our Robot

Overview

The best fea­ture of our ro­bot is its quick lift­ing. On our ro­bot, there is also a grip­per that is pneu­mat­i­cally dri­ven, and ex­erts 35 lbs. of force. The dri­ve­train fea­tures are the Omni wheels for turn­ing a tight ra­dius, high trac­tion tires for quick ac­cel­er­a­tion and im­proved turn­ing, a 6 wheel sus­pen­sion sys­tem for sta­bil­ity, and 4 pow­ered wheels for in­creased ma­neu­ver­abil­ity. The soft­ware fea­tures are a highly tuned drive sys­tem, auto height se­lec­tions for lift, a faster lift speed in hy­brid mode, and a hy­brid mode. Spe­cialty fea­ture is a tele­scop­ing life mech­a­nism for sim­plic­ity. Last is the “Safety FIRST,” which means that the forks are blunt, the spring mounted forks move eas­ily, the grip­per is flex­i­ble to bend when im­pacted, the grip­per’s ver­ti­cal force will se­curely hold the ball, and the de­sign is multi- func­tional for lift­ing and herd­ing.

Design

The ro­bot de­sign was in­ten­tion­ally kept as sim­ple as pos­si­ble to al­low us to con­cen­trate on per­fect­ing the de­sign. Our con­veyor sys­tem is a two-staged con­veyor sys­tem that uses a solid-core round ure­thane belt­ing. The two stage con­veyor sys­tem al­lows us to eas­ily con­trol how many balls we have in our pos­ses­sion and where they are in our sys­tem at one time.

Specifications

• Height 59″, Width 33.5″, Length 33.5″, Height mast extended 126″
• Weight 119.0 lbs.
• Speed 12 fps.-Lift trackball in 1.6 seconds!

Design

He­lios’s de­sign func­tion was to be a multi-pur­pose ro­bot built to put “Safety First”. The team chose to build in speed, herd­ing abil­ity, a fast lift sys­tem, and a sim­ple but highly func­tional grip­per mech­a­nism.

Controls

The con­trols were also a prod­uct de­signed for “Safety”. Clear vis­i­bil­ity, so judges can eas­ily see what is go­ing on in our ro­bot, was an im­por­tant part of our de­sign. A clear plas­tic cover en­sures vis­i­bil­ity of our con­trols. A hole in the cover lets us ac­cess the main cir­cuit breaker to quickly turn our ro­bot off. Swing­ing cov­ers pro­vide ac­cess to crit­i­cal com­po­nents to ren­der the ro­bot to a neu­tral state. The cover also in­cor­po­rates quick dis­con­nects to eas­ily ac­cess the con­trols for main­te­nance and re­pair if needed. The cover can with­stand ver­ti­cal and side im­pacts to more than 4 times ex­pected forces dur­ing the game. A fan pro­vides cool­ing for all the crit­i­cal con­trols com­po­nents while also pro­vid­ing air­flow over the drive mo­tors. The fi­nal elec­tri­cal de­sign al­lows max­i­mum power to be de­liv­ered to all power sys­tems. The com­po­nents were over­sized where prac­ti­cal to al­low for this max­i­mum de­liv­ery of power! He­lios is a fully func­tion­ing and com­pletely safe ro­bot.

Programming

The soft­ware code is crit­i­cal to the func­tion­al­ity of He­lios. The soft­ware al­lowed for easy op­er­a­tor ma­neu­ver­abil­ity, in­cor­po­rated crit­i­cal lift­ing “Safety” fea­tures while max­i­miz­ing per­for­mance on every sys­tem. Dri­vabil­ity and max­i­mum con­trol­lable lift speed was the key to the over­all suc­cess of He­lios.

Pneumatics

The pneu­matic sys­tem pow­ers the grip­per and al­lows for ease of use with max­i­mum power de­liv­ery through a flex­i­ble sys­tem. This sys­tem com­pli­ments the grip­per and helps achieve the “Safety First” grip­per de­sign

Drive Train

Speed was ob­tained by us­ing a sim­ple CIM mo­tor, trans­mis­sion with chain drive sys­tem. This drive sys­tem was sim­ple to build and main­tain. The drive sys­tem also achieved high ma­neu­ver­abil­ity with the chain drive, only uti­liz­ing the rear 4 wheels. This re­duced the turn­ing ra­dius to lit­er­ally half the length of the ro­bot. Trac­tion wheels were used in the cen­ter of the ro­bot and Omni-wheels on the ends. Herd­ing abil­ity was ob­tained with a sim­ple, flex­i­ble lower fork type de­sign. The ball can be eas­ily po­si­tioned be­tween the forks as the bend eas­ily to pres­sures ex­erted against them but have enough re­sis­tance to hold the ball. This al­lows the ball to slide across the car­peted floor and be herded over the end-line. Dual CIM mo­tors cou­pled to a stan­dard trans­mis­sion pro­vide the lift­ing power for the mast. This de­sign can lift the mast and ball from the floor to a full ex­ten­sion of 10’6” in un­der 1.6 sec­onds. At 6.5 ft/sec, this is one of the fastest lifts we have seen. Elec­tri­cal stops were added for safety at both the up­per and lower ends. “Safely” con­trol­ling the mass of the lift and ball at both ends makes the game “Safer” for all the ro­bots on the field.

Our Success

2008 St. Louis Regional

Our team started the sea­son at the St. Louis Re­gional, from Feb­ru­ary 28th to March 1st. We knew that this was one of the stronger re­gion­als and we wanted to see how we stacked up against some of the best teams in the na­tion. Our main goal was to get in as much prac­tice time as pos­si­ble in prepa­ra­tion for the Wis­con­sin Re­gional. We were de­lighted and sur­prised to do as well as we did amongst the 45 teams at­tend­ing. We made it to the semi-fi­nals, and we were beaten by the even­tual com­pe­ti­tion win­ners, an al­liance of teams 148, 217 and 830. We would like to thank our al­liance part­ners, teams 525 and 2044. They were great to work with and showed gra­cious pro­fes­sion­al­ism in the heat of bat­tle. We were ex­tremely proud to bring home three awards from this re­gional. Our team re­ceived the Kleiner Perkins Cau­field & By­ers En­tre­pre­neur­ship Award, the Un­der­writ­ers Lab­o­ra­tory In­dus­trial Safety Award and the Web­site Award.

2008 Wisconsin Lakes Regional

From March 13th through the 15th, our team at­tended the Wis­con­sin Re­gional. We de­cided to make a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the ro­bot af­ter St. Louis. We brain­stormed on how to make our ad­e­quate ro­bot even bet­ter. Af­ter our team de­cided to make a Lexan flip­per that en­abled us to re­move balls faster from the over­pass and we or­dered dif­fer­ent gears that made the ro­bot 50% faster. We knew that chang­ing the gear train would be risky be­cause we had a very lim­ited amount of time to swap out parts in Mil­wau­kee. Luck­ily, the sched­ule in Mil­wau­kee worked to our ad­van­tage and our great pit crew was able to make all mod­i­fi­ca­tions be­tween the pre­lim­i­nary matches. The Wis­con­sin re­gional sur­passed all of our ex­pec­ta­tions! We won the re­gional with al­liance part­ners 171 and 2549. Spe­cial thanks go out to team 171 for pick­ing us and as­sem­bling a great al­liance. Team work was crit­i­cal, and our al­liance per­formed like they had been work­ing to­gether for a very long time. The mem­o­ries from Mil­wau­kee will last a life­time. We were very happy to also win the Un­der­writ­ers Lab­o­ra­tory In­dus­trial Safety Award for sec­ond time. Then, we went off to At­lanta for the FIRST Cham­pi­onship, which was held from April 17th to April 19th.

2008 FIRST Championship

Our team qual­i­fied for the 2008 cham­pi­onship by win­ning the Wis­con­sin re­gional with the as­sis­tance of teams 171 and 2549. Our en­tire team was thrilled that our in­cred­i­ble jour­ney would not be end­ing just yet, but that we were able to con­tinue on to the In­ter­na­tional Cham­pi­onship in At­lanta, GA. Our team was not cho­sen for the fi­nal matches in our di­vi­sion. We were, how­ever, the win­ners of the Un­der­writ­ers Lab­o­ra­to­ries In­dus­trial Safety Award. Our en­tire team was thrilled to learn all of our hard work had paid off and that we were the safest team in the world. Our team had an in­cred­i­ble sea­son in 2008 and can­not wait for the 2009 sea­son to be­gin.

Other Components

• Website team worked on the website, which won an award.
• Safety team made sure the entire robotics team was unharmed. Thanks to their terrific efforts, we won the UL Industrial Safety Award at both regionals and at the Championship.
• Animation team did an amazing job making the safety animation and their annual entry to the Autodesk Visualization Award.
• Awards Won: UL Industrial Safety Award (both regionals and Championship), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Entrepreneurship Award, and Website Award.