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FRC 4322 2024 Technical Documentation Off-season TOAST
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FRC Team 4322: Clockwork

Technical Documentation

2024 Off-Season Robot: TOAST

Table of Contents

Design

3

       Intake

3

       Elevator/Pivot

4

       Shooter/Feeder

6

       Drivebase

7

       Control System

8

       Bumpers

9

Programming

10

       Vision

10

       Driver/Operator Controls

11

       Autos

12

Design

Intake:

The intake is an under-the-bumper, touch-it-own-it design, featuring three full-width rollers powered by a Falcon 500 motor and wrapped in silicone sleeving. To maintain grip, we clean the sleeving with rubbing alcohol after each practice. Once the game piece is pulled in, it's centered by two 50A 3” stealth wheels and two Banebots wheels, driven by a Kraken X60. Bent polycarbonate panels guide the game piece and shield the centering wheels’ belts. This simple yet robust mechanism ensures consistent and reliable floor intake.

Modifications from 5940:

Elevator/Pivot

The 2 stage continuous elevator is rigged with dyneema rope on 3d printed diran spools. The elevator is driven by 2 Kraken X60 motors at a 10.37:1 reduction with a custom gearbox. The elevator allows us to climb, trap, amp, and shoot over defense. The carriage or stage 2 of the elevator allows us to pivot our shooter. Climber hooks are integrated into the delta carriage side plates to pull the chain down into hooks in the robot for trap scoring purposes. An aluminum tube serves as our dead axle. The shooter pivots with #25 chain. The pivot has an overall reduction of 114.58:1 and uses a 25:1 MAXPlanetary gearbox for a high reduction in a small amount of space. The spline xl has 100% infill pla+ inserts to reinforce the shaft. 2 50 lbs gas shocks counteract the torque created by the shooter’s weight. A CANcoder provides measurements of the shooter’s pivot.

Modifications from 5940:

Shooter/Feeder:

We use 8 4” diameter 40A stealth wheels for our flywheels. The left and right side shooter pods are separately powered by two Kraken X60 motors to allow for spin on our shots. Slanted rollers, vectored intake wheels, and omni wheels help spread out the note for consistent shots. Polycarbonate idler rollers reduce friction on the note as it moves through the shooter. The front slanted rollers are angled down to score into the trap through the feeder. The feeder is powered by a Kraken X60 motor.

Modifications from 5940:

Drivebase:

We use legacy swerve x, flipped corner mounted with belts and aluminum wheels with black tread. Our drive has a ratio of 5.50:1 and steering has a ratio of 10.29:1. We use Kraken X60 motors for drive and Falcon 500 motors for steering. Our wheelbase is 26 x 28 and our frame size is 26 x 30.5.

Modifications from 5940:

Control System:

We mounted most of our electronics underneath the belly pan and use polycarbonate covers to protect them.

Modifications from 5940:

Bumpers:

Our bumpers are made with baltic birch wood that is finger-joined together. The bumpers angle up to allow notes to enter our under the bumper intake while not getting stuck under the robot on any of the other 3 sides. We opted for non-reversible bumpers to allow for a cleaner look. We found that the 1000 denier cordura fabric holds up the best from all of our testing in the 2023 season, but decided to experiment with super slick offensive bumper material for our vanity and blue sets. We opted to make vanity bumpers increase team branding. All of our sets of bumpers weigh within the 14-15 pound range. The bumpers are heavily reinforced with aluminum brackets and gussets in the corners to prevent damage from a hard contact game. Bumpers are mounted with flanged nuts.

Modifications from 5940:

Programming

Vision:

We use six Arducam OV9281 cameras mounted in such a way that we get near 360 degree vision coverage. Four cameras are angled outward for AprilTag detection and two cameras are angled downward for note detection. Three Orange Pis are used with two cameras connected through USB to each board. We use PhotonVision’s multi-tag pose estimation in order to combine pose estimates from multiple cameras, which is then fused with the odometry pose estimate for accurate full-field robot localization. Vision-based pose estimation is critical to the robot’s ability to shoot from anywhere into the speaker and pass from anywhere. It is also critical for ensuring auto paths are followed properly and allowing the robot to recover from disturbances such as hitting other robots when racing for center line notes.

Driver Controls:

The robot is driven and operated with 2 Xbox controllers.

Driver Controller

Operator Controller

Autos:

Autos are divided into 3 phases:

During the initialization phase, we set our field orientation and robot position on-field based on our preconfigured auto starting position.

While the robot is behind the wing line, we follow a series of PathPlanner paths that are stitched together in a sequential command group. Here’s an example:

This auto shoots the preload alongside three close notes in the order of Source, Center, Amp.

When the robot goes to the center line, we either follow a static PathPlanner path or dynamically switch between alternate PathPlanner paths when we don’t detect a note from our beam break sensor. Here’s an example:

This auto rushes to the center line (left image) and either returns to shoot (center image) or pivots to pick up the next closest center line note when no note is detected (right image).

List of Autos: