This is an official paper showing where we ranked in the Liberty Competition. Surprisingly there was also a raffle  held and many of our group members won prizes. I was fortunate enough to receive a small scholarship from the university.

Although we arrived late to the competition at Liberty University it went well. Our team made many improvements an we nearly made it to the semifinals round. As I mentioned before we made a spur of the moment decision and got help from one of the club programmers in order to change our two controllers to function as one controller. We also did not arrive to our matches late, which is definitely an improvement from the last competition.

                                          One last practice run before we head out to competition.

This what our current robot looks like. We were 460 D in both competitions and right before this we were about to pack up our supplies so we could travel to Liberty University.

While waiting for the next competition at Liberty University we came across another complication. It was something we had recognized before , but only decided to fix at this time. The front lifters were being held down by the weight of the claw. This caused them to drag a little and slow down the robot in the long run. WE thought about the best way to prevent this with out going against the restriction we had on the robot's size and weight and came up with a solution. We added more cross pieces directly under the lifters and they did not even add too much weight to the robot.

After altering the robot our robot had scissor lifters that were not off balance, and of course a claw that could capture more than on game piece at a time. We also had divided roles between our team and recognized that one of our Team mates should be the designated driver. And we decided to have a back up driver. Our one other team mate and I volunteered to be the coaches. Towards the end we attempted to try and all learn the basics in driving the robot , but since we had one person who drove the robot with more skill he tended to operate it better. Every time he was up also we had the back up driver as the person who steered the robot regardless. So there was always two people driving and one person coaching since we had two controllers. Until of course or last competition where we got help to reprogram the robot to have only one controller.

We had prepared for each of the two competitions to the best of our ability. The process in which you had to sign up for the competition and get your robot inspected became less foreign to us also after the previous competition. 

L.C. Bird Competition

As time went on we had to gear up for competition. Our first was held at home in the L.C. Bird Gymnasium. There was a problem with our lifters that we did not really recognize until after the competition. Scissor lifters have a lot to do with balance and ratios; if you have one slight difference in length of the individual components of the lifter this can cause the whole lifting mechanism to be tilted. Here is one of my classmates (our driver) getting our robot ready, and testing the controller and lifters exc. This competition at our high school was our first competition and mostly a learning experience. If I can recall our team scored the highest our of all of the teams from Bird . There were many complications during the competition, but in the end we survived. And got strict orders from one of our instructors to read the rule book.

                This is what our current robot looks like. The claws are still detached and there is no type of breaker mechanism or way of preventing the robot from tipping backward which it unfortunately does often when we manually lift the lifters. It functions quite well other than that one problem which we have lots of time to repair. We are very proud of our robot :), and with the supplies we had we certainly did a very satisfactory job making one from scratch with many of our group members (including me) having never built a robot before.

Programming

                We began the programming for our robot after we had built the main structure in order to test and see how well it would function. This line of code is actually very rudimentary, yet we are not attempting anything too complicated in order to ensure that if one of the group members has to rewrite or add-in anything they would not have too many complications interpreting the code. The commands are only to lift the lifters up and down, open and close the claw, and run the wheels of the robot.  Our main goal ,as of right now, is to actually have a running robot so that we can try and observe how it functions and see if we can observe any problems that might not be obvious from simply looking and moving the parts of the currently immobile robot. 

A Little Bit About Projects

              As a group we all viewed videos of previous competitions and different designs of robots in order to better visualize some of the conflicts that come up during a competition. We also built cardboard prototypes to better understand the actual size of the robot and what it was going to look like. We had a group member of the club give a short presentation on programming and tell us a little bit how it works. In Vex and any other type of designing or engineering it is vital to plan and map out what you want to do and the best strategy to accomplish the task. 

           Our workplace is in L.C.B. High School’s engineering wing. We work in room SC13, Mr. Wagner’s freshman engineering room. 

Planning

             Our instructors require us to always make initial plans and brainstorm about our ideas. Our team separated and gathered our idea into one proposal of what we thought would make our robot more efficient. We debated on the pros and cons of using several different designs that we had previously viewed on a videos in the first few days of the club. We talked about different aspects of a robot like torque, the center of gravity, structural systems, motion, power, and pivot. Eventually we came to an agreement on one idea. 

Robot

           As of right now this is our robot. We chose to use an extending and retracting arm on both sides, we are also going to attach a claw onto the end to grasp the game pieces. Since this is just the preliminary building of or robot we have not actually tested the efficiency of it. The center of gravity maybe of some concern because if the average position of all the mass on the robot is slightly off we are going to have a lot of difficulty during competition. Other than that aspect of the robot we chose to use a U-shaped chassis since we want to have a robot that sort of corrals the game pieces into the claws of the robot.  Also we used the 4” Omni wheel in the front in order to provide the robot with better mobility, and normal 4” wheels in the back similar to the set-up of a regular real life vehicle

Intro

In the engineering program at L.C.B. High School high school juniors are required to participate in a year  long engineering competition. We are divided into four large groups and our instructor Mrs. Hoover holds a seminar about the different projects we are assigned every nine weeks. Vex Robotics, which is the engineering competition I chose, is a high school club. In Vex we apply engineering and robotics in order to learn about the design , construction, and operations on electronics.  Robots are machines that can operate autonomously or in this case by programming and control systems.