The Robots

Our 2024-2025 robot, nicknamed Juliette, is a versatile and innovative design built from REV and goBILDA components. Juliette features Mecanum wheels for exceptional maneuverability, a horizontal goBILDA linear slide, two SWYFT vertical slides, eight motors, and two servos. Standing just under 18 inches tall, her linear slide extends to a maximum of 24 inches in one direction, adhering to the competition's designated size constraints. A vertical slide allows her to score high bucket samples and high chamber specimens.

Juliette is equipped with a two claws made of carbon fiber. The horizontal claw was specifically designed for grabbing samples from the submersible, and the vertical claw has a different design to facilitate the hand off and scoring.

For the climbing challenge, we engineered a system to achieve a third-level ascent. This mechanism uses a 3D-printed tentacle that wraps around the bar and then lifts the bot off the ground. A Swyft slide completes the ascent.

Ferdinand was not disassembled following the 2022-2023 season because he is very popular at outreach events.  The team began working on his sibling from scratch in September.  Once again, Grazia supplied the new robot with a name when he was in his infancy and on a camping trip with the team at Camp Marapai.  

Jerome was new and improved for our first qualifier with his motors attached inside the rails, two GoBilda slides, a pixel catcher that feeds into our claw mechanism for pixel placement, a drone launcher, and a hook to hang in Endgame. Jerome does it all!

 In the first qualifier, we swept undefeated into first place before falling in the semifinals.

Although very successful, we wanted Jerome to be smaller, quicker, and more efficient, leading us to break him down to component parts and rebuild him.  The basics of Jerome remained the same, but we assembled him to be more sleek and compact and with an improved pixel placement system.

 Grazia (also known as Sassafrass at Girl Scout camp), a member of Maya's troop, came into one of our meetings one day. She asked us, "Do you have a name for your robot?" (or something along those lines). As we didn't have one at the time, Maya replied, "We don't have one." Grazia decided, "Its name is Ferdinand the Bot." The name stuck. 

When attaching giant googly eyes, we decided that Ferd is a cyclops. It may have been because we could only fit one eye. 

After someone brought up a cyclops' traditional diet, we decided that Ferdinand would be fueled with Girl Scout cookies, as we are. 

This photo of Ferdinand is at an outreach event.  He is carrying a Brownie Girl Scout doll to do a "meet and greet."