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Showing posts from March, 2024

Comparisons of various drivetrains for FGC 2023

  Comparisons of Drivetrains for FGC 2023 4 Wheel Drive Advantages: They have good manoeuvrability and turning. Disadvantages: There is less traction because fewer wheels Less power from motors  Typically, the front two wheels are Omni wheels for increased turning ability. 6 Wheel Drive Standard 6-wheel drive: Advantages: They have high traction and stability Disadvantages: They need more maneuverability and turning. Two or more motors must be used per side, as splitting one motor over three wheels is horrible. The motors have to be powered according to the turning and traction If we use four motors, two motors power two of the middle wheels and the other two can power either the front two or the back two. An issue that is faced is that the turning could be better. There are two methods to fix this. 1) West Coast drivetrain -> further explained 2) Corner Omni -> This is where the corner traction wheels are replaced with omni wheels, which helps to achieve better turnin...

Learnings from FIRST Robotics competition

I recently participated in FRC by joining RFactor, A team based in Mumbai. Although I lived in Goa, I would travel to Mumbai during my holidays, especially during Diwali, Christmas and summer holidays. Despite this restriction I persevered by spending 16-18 hours every day at the lab. With this commitment I was able to contribute hugely to the team in the areas of Programming, CAD and prototyping. Me and Viraj together managed the entire programming aspect and coded the swerve drive of the robot. We used pathplanner and YAGSL for this and were able to make a highly accurate swerve. Using a pathplanner meant that our robot's autonomous code was very accurate and could correct itself at any moment using accurate odometry.  This meant we could change the autonomous path right before the match and adjust our autonomous to our alliances. Due to our accurate odometry and pathplanner our autonomous would never fail and always deliver us points. We used paths of 1+1 and 2+1 based on our al...

Industrial Design award at Marmara FRC Regional in Istanbul

I am part of  Team 6024 RFactor that won the prestigious “Industrial Design Award By General Motors” at the Marmara FRC Regional in Istanbul. Our robot raised the notes and reached the Crescendo when we achieved that fine balance of form, function and elegance for our machine!! I was the rookie member for 9th FRC season amongst the team of 24 members that had only 1 veteran member with 3 years experience, 3 members with 1 year of experience and 21 rookie team members!!! The team over 8 months built robot mechanisms during the pre-season, doing impactful outreach, building the exciting swerve drive, multi-angled shooter, CAD, fabricating parts & anodisation, under the chassis wiring and much more. I was part of all the sub teams contributing and learning hands on. However the programming the robot and getting the autonomous code to work was the most satisfying part.