Avon High School Robotics Build Season Week Two Update

The ÜberBots have been hard at work for the past two weeks preparing themselves for the upcoming competition season! All of the team members are hard at work performing various tasks that will ensure success at the team’s three competitions this year, from design brainstorming to award submissions.

The team began with an overall strategy discussion and a reading of the game manual put out by FIRST to describe the various rules of the 2015 challenge. The team broke into groups during the Kickoff event to go through the rules and make note of anything that they found important, then for the next several days discussed their findings in the larger group. The conclusions made in these discussions drove the discussion of robot design.

Finally, several days ago, the fabrication and design teams made a decision about what this year’s robot will look like. The next step is for CAD (Computer-Aided Design) students to draw up a 3D model of the robot design so that the mechanical students can have a reference for dimensions when they are building the finished product. The team will have to build two identical robots, one for competition and one for practice. The competition robot will have to be put in a bag prior to competition as confirmation that the students spent no more than the allotted six and half weeks working on it.

Luckily, one of the most important parts of the robot is already complete: the drive train. The team will be utilizing an H-Drive, which involves five omni wheels, so that the robot can easily maneuver around the many obstacles around the field. Now the team can move on to the larger structure of the robot.

Outside of the workshop, the Community subteam is working on awards submissions and public relations. Part of the team will be attending a Jr. FLL Expo with Farmington’s team, the Enforcers, on the 31st. The students will work with elementary-aged kids to help them get interested in the FIRST program. In addition, the essays for the Chairman’s Award and Entrepreneurship Award are being prepared. These awards will be submitted at each competition that the team attends and give them the opportunity to earn district points, which help the team reach the regional championship.

As of right now, the team has approximately four and a half weeks left to build their robot and prepare themselves for the season. The ÜberBots are attending an event during the first week of competition season in Waterbury, followed by a week three event in Massachusetts and a week five event in Hartford. From there, they will hopefully move on to higher level competitions at WPI and in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Feel free to visit the ÜberBots website at http://www.uberbots.org/o or FIRST’s website at http://www.usfirst.org for more information on the Avon team and FIRST Robotics.