On January 5th, FRC teams gathered to watch the 2019 kickoff event. We learned this years game (You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mew6G_og-PI) and began our planning.
As of now, the robot build team has come up with a claw mechanism. We are planning to use that to pick up the cargo without making the cargo roll away or be moved at all. Our plan is to have it look similar to a backhoe excavator. The team has also purchased a limelight 2 camera that has vision tracking. We are using this to be able to see the cargo better and will hopefully make lining the robot up to the cargo a lot easier. We have tested it out and so far, it's working how we want it to. We have also decided on tank drive with eight inch pneumatic wheels.
Our design team has been hard at work on the shirt, pin, and banner ideas for this season. At the moment, we have many ideas and planning on using one that involves a claw machine for the shirt. That way we can incorporate the claw from the robot with our apparel to have everything tie together. The claw machine will be picking up a UFO which will represent the space theme of this years game, destination deep space. For our pin, we leaning towards having Saturn as the main focus with a UFO flying around it. As for the banner, it will be a giant UFO. We are also working on coming up with a new scavenger hunt game like the one we had at our competitions last year! Make sure to look for it at the Lincoln and Belleville competitions because we will have a treat in our pit for everyone who completes the game!