Titanium Robotics’ build season has officially begun! This past Saturday, the team held its annual kickoff— an event where the team watches the game reveal video for this season’s challenge so that design brainstorming for the robot can begin. To start the game, each robot can be preloaded with up to three Power Cells; teams then have fifteen seconds, an autonomous period (when the robot is not controlled by a driver), to shoot each Power Cell into any of the three Power Ports (goals along the walls of the field), with one Power Port being worth two points, another worth four, and the hardest to reach worth six points. Despite all Power Ports granting a different amount of points, all Power Cells add the same amount of charge to something called the Shield Generator, a balance-like structure in the middle of the field. After this fifteen second period, there is a two minute and fifteen second teleoperated period (when the robot is controlled from a distance by team members with controllers), where Power Cells can be collected by robots from five chutes. Once collected, the robots are driven to the other side of the ‘city’, or field, to be launched into Power Ports— the Low Port for one point, Outer Port for two, and Inner Port for three points— in order to activate parts of the Shield Generator. The robot must also rotate a Control Panel with different colors a certain number of times and then turn the panel to land on a specific color.
All of these tasks are done in order to activate the Shield Generator, and once all tasks are completed by an alliance the Shield Generator is energized, and robots then go to their Rendezvous Point, or a portion of the field surrounding the Shield Generator, in order to make their Shield Generator operative. Robots do so by clinging onto and hanging from the Shield Generator in order to level it. In order to begin brainstorming designs, the team held an event known as “Playdate” where cardboard prototypes are built and presented and shared between team members.
The designs agreed upon at the Playdate are currently being built at after-school work sessions in the Robotics room (308). Please come and join us as we roll into this year’s build season; all help is welcome and appreciated, and no prior experience is required.
Titanium Robotics is a team consisting of over 100 students, mainly from San Marino High School, who come together with a common interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Students learn from professional engineers and mentors to build and compete in the annual FIRST Robotics Challenge with a robot of their own design. Programming, electrical work, computer-aided design, and business management are all run by student representatives, making the entire organization student-led from start to finish.
