We are going to assemble our game field and walk you through building your own.

Firstly, you will want a large and open space like a garage or basement. Next, you are going to want walls to contain your robot. We used long pieces of plywood with small metal brackets and a hook to keep them together. We strongly recommend using tiles similar to the gray ones we used here.

Now for the most difficult part, putting together the game elements. This year we are putting together junctions. We have already assembled the yellow piece of the junction, so we just need to secure it to the bottom of the game field as shown in the bottom right.

FTC's website has information on how to assemble all of the game elements, we will post the links to this as well as all the other products and resources we have talked about in the description of this video.

You will always have to use tape, we used green painter's tape but anything will work as long as it will stay on the field without destroying the tiles when you try to remove it.

After that your game field is complete! Having a game field is fantastic for accurately representing the fields used at actual events, it is a great way to practice in a similar environment to the matches.

We have linked all of the products and resources you may need in the description. If you have any questions please feel free to ask them in the comments. Thank you for watching.

Thank you for watching this video and good luck building your field!

Hello First Tech Challenge teams, today we're going to be talking about drive systems. More specifically we're going to be going over the drive base that our team decided on for Power Play, the reasons why and the mechanics behind the drive train itself.

A robot's drive base is the mechanism it uses to move around the field - what makes it drive. Of the wheeled drives, there are many popular types. Like the reliable two-wheel drive with two powered back wheels and free spinning omni wheels in the front. Or a four-wheeled mecanum drive base that gives the robot the power to strafe left and right as well as go forwards back and turn by using four motors.

However, in Power Play, our team decided to go with a different omni-directional drive system instead of the conventional mecanum wheels often seen in competitions. This year we went with what we call an omni-x configuration. Where we use omni wheels at 45-degree angles on the corners of our robot to move in all four directions.

This is much less expensive than buying mecanum wheels so our team was able to build a robot like this for our second year. It can also perform better than mecanum wheels in other situations. For example, Power Play has lots of obstacles, so strafing is going to be very useful. Angled wheels reduce the size of the robot's profile compared to mecanum wheels; making it easier to get around the playing field. The omni-x drive is much smoother than other omni-directional systems which helps with placing game elements.

The internal space taken up by angled motors isn't needed for our design for Power Play and there also aren't any obstacles needed to drive over, that being a weakness of the angled wheels.

Taking all of this into consideration showed us that an omni-x system was the way to go for this season's robot.

Upgrading to an omni-directional system is a big deal and using omni wheels to try it out is a great idea! We hope that this video has shown your team the benefits of an omni-x drive train over others. It's a very useful design that we would love to see more at competitions. Thanks for watching and good luck building.