VEX Skyrise
Robotics //
For my second year doing VEX Robotics, the game was based around the idea of stacking large pegs to make a tower, and then to score coloured cubes on this tower and other poles around the field. After having learned the basics of VEX robotics last year, I was able to do even better this time. Once again, I was the leader of my two-man team, but unlike last year we worked together with the school's senior team, which also consisted of only two members.
Intake Design: The intake was the first part of the robot we designed, and we spent a large amount of time developing it. Our idea was to score both a peg and a cone at once, and this allowed us to score fast enough to get one of the top skills scores in the world. Our intake design for the provincial championship and the tournaments leading up to it was a wedge shape made out of two pieces of polycarbonate, and a motorized claw that fit underneath it. The wedge would go through a cube to pick it up, and the claw inside was used to grasp the pegs. For the world championships we switched the design to be better at scoring cubes, and this design consisted of a long piece that would go inside of a cube through the top and a latch would hold the cube in place. To pick up the pegs we had a passive plunger that would grip it from the top, and it worked fairly well. This intake could hold up to two cubes at once.
Lift Design: Initially we had wanted to build a scissor lift, like we had done last year, but our design was too unstable. While trying to build the scissor lift we also designed custom rails that had a significantly smaller amount of friction than the rails we used last year, but were also much larger than the standard rails that other teams use. Our next idea was to create a reverse double four bar, which does not require sliders to achieve vertical motion. The 5'+ lift presented a variety of new challenges, like dealing with stability and higher amounts of torque.
Mecanum Wheel Drive: After testing the robot with the Omni wheels that most successful VEX robots use, we found that we needed to be able to strafe left and right to be a successful robot. There are several ways to implement strafing in a robot, but the limited amount of motors meant that it was best for us to use the less efficient Mecanum wheels. Strafing allowed for the robot to easily align itself when placing the pegs to build the 'skyrise'.
With a larger build team and more experience, we worked quickly and had one working bot and one mostly built robot for the first tournament. Both robots competed well, but the unfinished clone that I was driving had several issues in the first few matches that needed to be fixed and it caused us to end up 23rd out of 25 teams. Fortunately, we fixed most of the problems, and made it to the semi-finals. For the next tournament, we practiced heavily for the skills challenge, and after scoring an impressively high skills score there, we were the top team in North America for driver skills. A few weeks later some American teams beat this score, but we would remain top in Canada until the provincial championship. At the provincials, we faced the two teams that everyone had been expecting to win, but in an underdog situation we managed to defeat both teams in the round-robin matches, putting us in the first place seed. This is the link to the second match, against team 5225A, which was the team that had gotten a better skills score than us. We picked the faster of those two bots for alliance selection, and went on to win the tournament without a single loss.
At the world championships we did decently well and we were in the top thirty teams of our division after the round-robin matches, but unfortunately we were not picked during alliance selection.
Here are the links to a few of our world's matches: