FTC State

This Thursday and Friday I traveled with part of the LASA Robotics team to attend the FIRST FTC (First Tech Challenge) state robotics competition. We had built a robot and wanted to compete; although we ended up in the first place alliance (teams of two), the really fun part was seeing how everyone attempted said challenge. In order to win points, you must lift crates containing racquetballs; more points can be had for height.

Photo by Daniel

Some of the robots are pictured above: first is ours, "PHobia" (our team name is Purple Haze, the school color). Second, a scissor lift, third, an articulated arm, and fourth, a forklift-like pulley mechanism.

The scissor lift can obviously get amazingly high for the 18" starting cube boundary. So too can that strange pulley mechanism. The only problem is that they have trouble grabbing crates- they aren't reliable. Therefore, robots 1 and 3 used a gripper. Aforementioned 3rd robot's arm was amazing, but it wasn't very strong. If anything hits it hard enough, it breaks. Therefore, I'm glad to say that our robot was one of the best ones present.

The gripper we built was the only one of its type that we saw. It can pick up a crate, rotate it, and put in a racquetball. The best part, though, was that it could stack. We were able to lift up one crate, put it on another, and lift both- sometimes in less than thirty seconds (that's really good)! Most of all, it was reliable. I suppose that's why we, having beaten the ridiculously high scissor lifts, were on the winning team. It's also a good lesson to take away.