Robot

ROBOT

Introducing TAG 4.0, a robot on a quest to complete all 15 missions on the Unearthed mat. With its drop-in hub, multiple sensors, and 4 different shells, it's ready for the challenge.

Each year FLL Challenge teams are tasked with building and coding an autonomous robot to compete in a robot game completing missions for points on a mat. At competitions we share our robot design process in our judging session, and we also get to compete in the robot game. You can learn more about our robot, TAG (which stands for Team Alpha Geek) below.

Identify

We spent time at the world championship studying how other teams completed missions so quickly, which inspired us to test many different ideas during our off-season, such as a drop-in hub, drop-on attachments, wheels, and Tacobot, a 3-sensored robot from Carnegie Mellon. A lot of these ideas didn't get chosen, but testing them helped us identify which to incorporate into our robot!

Design

We decided as a team to further develop the drop-in hub and drop-on attachment ideas. We went through several versions before choosing the drop-in hub because it allows for quicker transitions and would challenge us. We built and tested two designs, choosing the one with gear outputs on three sides of the robot and a flat back that can line up against the wall. We all worked to create the final design with multiple shells and two identical hub cores. We created a CAD version of our shell to look back on if needed. One unique part of our team is that everyone helps code and build our robot!

Iterate

Our robot and mechanisms went through many iterations this season. For example, on cluster four, we made a scissor lift inspired by the Isogawa books. It was difficult getting the gears strong enough for our scissor lift to work. We tested gears, worm gears, rubber bands, treads, and finally found a small rack and pinion was strong enough!

Communication

With each side using a different robot, we had to make sure that the robots remained identical throughout the entire season. To do this, we periodically checked the differences between the robots. If we found any, one of us would go home and make them identical again. We also wanted to make sure that each side knew what the other side was doing. We achieved this by creating a robot log that we filled out after every meeting, taking note of what each coding side did. We also created a GANTT chart based on the Engineering Design Process (Identify, Design, Create, Iterate, Communicate) to have a plan for our season.

Our team's GANTT chart.

Watch a video of TAG 3.0 from Submerged (24-25)

Watch a video of TAG 2.0 from Masterpiece (23-24)

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