This year, with a young team, we tackled the task of building a robot for the 2010 game "Breakaway". Kick Kat is our fastest robot yet, and it is an arcade driven robot. It has a rocking design so it can pivot on the middle wheels. It grabs onto balls with two vacuum cups, and then kicks it into the goal. Aside from an overly complex drive train that killed us in Pittsburgh, it is a simple robot.
2009 - Apollo 451
This year, the game was "Lunacy", and we decided that our robot was going to collect and shoot balls. Apollo 451 is a tank driven robot that had a harvesting mechanism in front to pull balls up, and a flywheel then shot the balls out on command. Originally, the top could move, but we deiced to have it fixed forward. This year was the first year with the new controller, a cRIO. Because of this, most of the Programming/Controls meetings were dedicated to learning the new system, which could be programmed in C++ or LabVIEW. Despite this, on of the new programmers had experience with C++, and figured out the system, causing 98% of the code to be written before the last Monday that we shipped. Mechanisms was not ready however, because of the harvester/flywheel and design issues. Once we Shipped we went to the Buckeye Regional in Cleavland, OH and the Boilermaker Regional at Purdue. We finished 7-12-0. Some of the losses were caused by ridiculous errors: Forgetting to plug in the battery and forgetting to plug in the Communication system. Although our robot had problems, our team was one of the best. One of the Programmers greatest accomplishments was taking footage of a match with the on board camera, and saving that to disk. Here is one of the videos (NOT taken by regular camera):
2008 - CATastrophe
In 2008, The team's robot, Catastrophe, made an appearance at Ypsilanti, MI, and Pittsburg, PA. In both competitions the robot was chosen by one of the top 8 ranked teams to be in their alliance.
2007 - PiR8
In 2007, the game was "Rack 'n Roll." We decided that our robot would be an offensive robot and would place rings on the rack. Our robot, PiR8, was a tank driven base with an articulated arm and gripper. At the Buckeye Regional in Cleveland, OH our team won the Judges Award. The robot had occasional problems, but our team has fun and it was overall a good year.
© The Cat Attack 2011
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