Day 1 Recap 2022 Season

Happy Sunday! We hope everyone had a great first day of Ri3D.

This year, FIRST hosted another successful virtual kickoff introducing this year’s new challenge - Rapid React, released in partnership with Boeing. Rapid React features both a shooting aspect, with a lower and upper hub, and a climbing aspect. There’s also the potential for human players to score points by tossing the cargo into the upper hub from their driving station, which adds another interesting layer to the game.

With so many unique ways to tackle this challenge, Full Moon Robotics launched straight into our stream. During the initial brainstorming, we discussed the shooting mechanism, the intake mechanism, and the climbing mechanism. Based on our resources and the time we have available, we decided to have a floor-pickup mechanism for intake instead of relying on the player station for cargo retrieval. We also decided to focus on climbing to the second-lowest rung of the hangar, with our reach goals being to get to the higher two rungs. For the shooting aspect, we decided to aim primarily for the lower hub. For more details about our general thoughts on strategy and for more information on how we reached these decisions, see our Game Strategy and Scoring Analysis. We also noted that we need to emphasize durability, especially in terms of protecting the climbing mechanism and ensuring that a fall from the hangar wouldn’t be too catastrophic.

After wrapping up the initial brainstorm, we transitioned to the Garage and split into our subteams. While the Programming subteam focused on updating the roboRIO and creating dummy code for the robot, the Build and Design subteams collaborated to discuss potential robot designs and strategies in a more in-depth manner. They were able to reach a consensus on the shooting mechanism and climbing mechanism. After this discussion, the Design subteam then worked to create simplified CAD models of the mechanisms to represent rough dimensions of the finalized product while the Build subteam focused on deconstructing last year’s robot and figuring out the best way to reuse our resources from last year, leaving the chassis and intake mechanism intact. It should be noted that per rules R302 and R303 this would not be allowed in an FRC match. However, since we’re a Ri3D team with limited time and resources, we decided to do so.

Overall, we had a successful first day and were able to set up what we needed for Day 2!