     |
The construction crew, where the robot is built or broken, has to work right. So a productive preparation period is vital. We decided to start work as early as possible during our summer holiday. We wanted to have a basic knowledge and understanding of building techniques as well as designing methods. With the help of our mentors we designed small systems like an omnidirectional drive system and a robot that travels up stairs. To home in our building skills we took on small pet projects such as a metal cube or making last year's robot a low-rider (the gangster cars that jump up and down). By the end of the preparation period we were very comfortable with the tools and design method. Now we were ready for the kickoff. So, on the 9 of January we sat riveted to the NASA webcast channel to find out what this year's game would be. Our first task was to choose a basic strategy that will guide our robo t design. The first week was spent entirely on testing different kicker designs and coming up with new ones, as well and building the bump and a basic chassis to understand more about how the robot acts on the bump. After finding a flaw in the basic chassis design we looked for a way to soften the impact created when the robot left the bump and hit the ground. Pondering whether to use leaf springs or just rubber pads we finally decided on pneumatic rear wheels. There housing was quite a challenge since nothing really fit the wheels. Our hard work paid off and by the end of the week we had a completed drive system. The third week was a busy and crucial week. We started designing the system that will hang the robot of the tower. By sheer luck we designed a hanging system for the 2004 game as a practice project and tested it even before the kickoff. So in that respect we were set. By our previous experiments we realized that an elastic kicker would be most effective for our needs, but were baffled by an arming mechanism. In the third week we finally cracked it, our system consists of two winches, a bicycle break and pneumatic piston. Proudly I can say that even the though the kicker system is quite complicated and precise, we fabricated it entirely by our self's. On the fourth week of the build season we were finally ready to test the whole kicker system when to our surprise what worked by hand didn't when the robot tried. We found ourselves changing the kicker completely. Happily we managed to simplify the kicker, build it and try it out. A father of a team member was kind enough to help us out with the hanging arm. After designing it in the third week we eventually sent the plans to the father who started fabricating the arm from carbon fiber. At the beginning of the fifth week the training robot began to come together. Since we didn't know of the setback up ahead we were ecstatic when the CEO of Microsoft Israel visited us and the robot worked perfectly. Unfortunately unforeseen circumstances and lack of materials left us without a sturdy plan for a ball catcher. This brings us to the beginning of the sixth week, where only hard work and good planning can end in a complete and well adapted robot. 
|