End of Week 9

What to aspect next week

• Pick our groups for the next challenge
• Take apart everything except the base of the robot
• Aim to finish the robot for the Nov. 3 challenge
• Come up with a design for Dec. 9th challenge

These next couple of weeks are going to extremely busy because we have limited time to come up with a design for a robot that has to pick up balls and place them in a specific area. Several ideas have been discussed but we haven't been able to come up with a solid idea yet.We know that we want to use the base of our old robot, so we began taking out all the extra components and left the basics.

Results of the tug-a-war Challenge

We lost because:

• The axles kept coming out of the motors
• The gears still weren't aligned
• Bad communication amongst the team members

Although we were able to finish our solidworks build successfully, the lack of attention toward our robot proved to be disastrous in the end.  We were not able to get all of the gears in place or align them, causing them to slide as the robot moved. Also, the axles were not secure in the motors, causing one side of the robot to completely stop moving during the competition. Lastly, bad communication about ideas to improve the robot during the competition lead to our robot being prematurely thrown into a match, resulting in a fast victory for the other team. Overall, we learned communication is key and contributions from everyone is the only way to succeed.

Start of week 9

Goals for this week:

• Put the gears back on the robot
• Test out the robot and discover why the right side wont move forward
• Win a match against another bot

Tomorrow is our last chance at redeeming ourselves in this competition. We haven't won a match in the last two competitions. We learned from our mistakes that 1) our gears weren't aligned 2) one side of the robot was unable to move forward, only backward 3) many screws and gears were lose. We have been working hard to make adjustments and we hope we will be successful.