This week at Ingraham Robotics, we’re back from our first competition! Today we’ll be summarizing our performance and notes from the competition, and our plans moving forward as the next competition quickly approaches.
Into the Ring
This past weekend, we participated in our first FTC competition of the season! We placed 4th out of 10 teams, and recognized many of the strengths and weaknesses of our robot. Particularly, our programming team picked up on many hidden issues within our auto code, and is working on fixing this as we speak. Build team also noted some issues with our arm and scissor lift design, and is currently drafting ideas on how to resolve this.
Meanwhile, the business team spent competition scouting other designs and watching carefully over what’s been working and what hasn’t on other teams’ designs. Particularly, we noted a few teams who performed exceptionally well, and we’re looking into reaching out to them in the future- more on that later.
Next Steps
With the competition now over, the team is now looking towards making improvements as the next competition quickly approaches. Team lead Charlie says that the team is still considering the other design for the robot, but is currently focusing on small improvements to the robot. Particularly, the grip mechanism on our arm needs strengthening, and though we were able to make improvements on the fly at the competition, we’re looking into a stronger (no pun intended) and more long-term solution.
The team is especially investigating the effectiveness of our current collector mechanism. Though the arm works well on paper, in practice we have now found it is not as accurate or easy to use as we’d like it to be. For the reason, we’re considering more effective alternatives to our current collector
On business team, our lead Robin is working on contacting members of Chickenados and Atomic Robots to look into organizing a scrimmage. We noticed that each of them did very well at the competition, and would love to work with them as competition season moves forward! We’ll have more updates on that in the coming weeks.
Into the Future
Overall, it’s been an exciting week for Ingraham Robotics! We’re happy to be back in the thick of competition season, yet our work is far from done. I’ll be back next week with a report on how progress on the robot has been going. Thanks for reading!
-Ryan