LRT-Upper Valley Robotics is a FIRST robotics team. The organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) designs a new "game" each year for a robot to play, and organizes an international robotics competition. Our team plays FIRST's game, but we aren't part of the FIRST organization.
Every year to play the "game", each team of high school students and adult coaches collaborate on the production of a robot from scratch. In six weeks, a 130lb robot goes from concept, to design, to fabrication, to testing, and ultimately to competition. This competition is designed to increase awareness and interest in science and technology among high school students. The construction of a robot involves many tasks and vast amounts of time. In the words of our former head coach, students involved in FIRST don't have any time to be on drugs, so there's another benefit of the team. In addition to raw time and effort, the production aspect entails fabricating metal and working with machine tools. There are also many subgroups and talents that a team requires. From computer animation and programming, to fund raising, to publicity, to artwork, there is a place for everyone and their unique abilities. With this much diversity in activities, FIRST appeals to people with a wide variety of interests.
Our team has an interesting history. The team was founded in 1996 as the LRT (Lebanon Robotics Team). Over time it expanded to include a number of area high schools. It is now known as the LRT Upper Valley Robotics team (keeping LRT for name recognition). For the 2000 competition, we used a grasshopper graphic on the side of our robot because it fit the shape of the robot (and it just made sense with the robot being named Grace Hopper). The following year we decided to use the grasshopper again and adopted it as our offical logo. When the spectators started calling us the Grasshoppers, our unofficial identity was complete.
On our team, high school students are involved in every facet of the team and local engineers provide expertise, leadership and mentoring. Some teams have the coaches handle most of the work, but we believe in keeping true to the FIRST ideals. We have an excellent student/coach ratio. In 2002, we had around 40 students and 10 coaches. These people divide their time between the different aspects of the team according to their interests. Despite several rival high schools and competing companies being represented, everyone gets along very well.
In the early years, our team did most of the robot manufacturing at CRREL (Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory). In 2002 we moved our base of operations to New Hampshire Industries, where we have been graciously donated a large work space and use of an extensive machine shop. In 2005, Whitman Communications donated space in their building for a team workshop. Donations of all kinds have been growing of late, which is definitely a good thing! The annual budget is between $20,000 and $30,000. We are very thankful for the many generous donations in support of the team.
In 2002, we held a post-season competition known as Rally in the Valley. This was by far our best publicity stunt, not to mention a lot of fun. To the best of anyone's knowledge, this is the only competition to ever show a profit. We immediately had teams trying to sign up for next year and we didn't even know if we could run it again, as the amount of work that goes into planning such an event is enormous. The event was repeated in 2003 because it was a generally a good experience and it generated a lot of the community awareness. There are no current plans to continue it, due to a lack of vounteers.
1997 - Isaac
In the beginning, there was Isaac, named for Isaac Asimov, the famous author of robotic stories. This robot sported a grabber arm that could
grab the tubes on both the inside and outside. Unfortunately by the time this description was written, most of the people familiar with this robot had left the team, so finding more information about it was difficult. Like most old robots, it was disassembled for parts
1998 - Archimedes
Named for the famous Greek mathematician, this robot had the ability to score and unscore points with ease. By sucking opponent's balls out of
the goal, nearly perfect control of the game was maintained by our team. The scoring mechanism consisted of a large conveyor belt that could
hold two balls at a time. The drivetrain was standard "tank style" with the key feature of having the middle wheel on each side lowered by a fraction
of an inch so the scrubbing when turning would be kept to a minimum.
1999 - Mac
This robot carried as its namesake a teacher at Lebanon High School who passed away. Its drive train was an engineering marvel. The wheels
were solid aluminum made with a CNC machine in such a way that there were parts that rolled perpendicularly to the hub, giving the robot the abilty
to move in any direction without turning. This was the year of the puck, a mobile piece of playing field approximately 6" taller than the flat field.
Mac had a "boinker" on the front, which was, in the words of one engineer, a "high-impact momentum transfer device," otherwise known as a spring.
This was for moving the puck about the field. Another device for moving the puck lifted one edge of it entirely off the field causing the robots on top
to fall off. For this play, we won several defensive awards.
2000 - Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper, a computer programmer famous for coining the term Computer Bug, among other things, was the inspiration behind the name of this robot.
This robot was fast, clocking in at more than 7ft/s. It could hold 6 balls at a time and score them very well. A modification at one of the competitions
provided it with a brake so no one could push us around. This bot was intented to do one thing and do it well. We could score balls more than twice as fast as most of the other robots. This is still considered
one of our best bots, and we use it for fundraising demos to this day. This is the robot where our grasshopper logo first started, and as you can see in the image, the side of the robot does have a
vaguely grasshopper-like shape.
2001 - Nikola Tesla
Perhaps you've heard of a Tesla Coil, used for generating high voltages. It's inventor is where we got the name for this bot. The name fit quite well when
you consider the power of this robot. It could haul both goals full of balls with ease and almost never had traction problems due to the fact that it transferred
a lot of the weight of the goals to its own drive wheels. Unfortunately, we made the nearly fatal mistake of considering our allies incompetent and trying to do everything ourselves.
This led to a very heavy and unreliable robot. The old saying is true: jack of all trades, master of none. This robot was
so heavy it didn't pass the weight limit at the nationals until someone kicked the scale... then it read a solid 130. Even so, we must
have done something right because we seeded in the top 8 at the Mid-Atlantic regional and our alliance took home the regional championship.
We learned an important lesson of simplicity and specialization from this robot, and also learned that it pays to stick to FIRST's ideals.
2002 - Richard Feynman
One of the greatest scientific minds of the past century, Richard Feynman made a big impact in helping to develop the atom bomb, among other things.
He also had a knack for solving problems through dumb luck. We wouldn't try to claim this robot was dumb luck, but it did perform amazingly well!
Imagine a popcorn popper blown up to gigantic proportions with wheels strapped on the bottom and a 2400rpm roller set on the front. That's our bot!
We could suck up a line of 20 soccer balls before the announcer finished declaring the match started. Our handy-dandy hopper on top could disgorge
all of the balls very quickly, so scoring was a snap. Many of this robot's features were borrowed from Grace, so we already knew how to build the key
components. We took our first foray into the wonderful world of pneumatics and came out more than just alive, but spectacular. With our pneumatic-powered,
stair-tread coated brake down, only the strongest bots could move us.
This was by far the best year we've ever had, despite the fact that we were unable to go to the nationals and didn't win any regionals. Our bot worked like clockwork,
everyone had fun building it, and most importantly, everyone loved to see it operate! On top of having a great bot, this was the year we hosted the first
Rally in the Valley, our post-season competition.
2003 - Kalpana Chawla (KC)
Kalpana Chawla was a NASA Astronaut who perished with the other crew members of the Columbia space shuttle. Her nickname was "KC", which worked well for our robot.
"Before Kalpana Chawla was born, her mother had been hoping for a son. "But out came Kalpana," her mother told the Week magazine in India, "who has achieved more than a boy could." Kalpana decided she wanted to be a space engineer by the time she was 14 and was the only woman to study aeronautics at Punjab Engineering College. Still, the idea of going to America was a shock to the members of her traditional family, and they agreed only on the grounds that her brother Sanjay would come with her to settle her in. She became an astronaut in 1994 and flew her first shuttle mission in 1997."
KC had the most advanced drive system of her time: a combination of ackerman and crab steering (dubbed "crackerman"). She was designed to have 4 wheels driven and steered at the same time. Unfortunately she used worm gears in the transmission and had terrible efficiency, we were drawing 60 amps with no load on the robot. Also, the basic stamp was far too weak to handle the computations needed to effectively perform Ackerman steering. And since we could not get our second processor to work (we had a dual processor setup) we could not update the motor outputs fast enough and the robot never worked as it should have, barring one match. In one match it worked perfectly and we won. Otherwise KC was a disappointment. We learned a tough lesson though: "don't get in over your head". KC's design was complex and some engineering mistakes were made.
2004 - Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian artist and scientist, master of the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture; accomplished engineer; and pioneer investigator in the natural sciences. The most versatile genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo's scientific research and observations, were far in advance of his time, anticipating in many ways the attitudes and achievements of the 20th Century.
2005 - Thomas Edison (Eddie)
Thomas Edison (1847-1931), American inventor and pioneer industrialist. Rough-hewn and self-educated, Edison rose to become a folk hero in his day and one of the most prolific inventors of all time. During his lifetime more than a thousand American patents were granted on work of his own or of teams under his supervision. Three of his inventions - the phonograph, a practical incandescent light and electric system, and a moving picture camera - helped found giant industries that were to change the life and leisure of the world. Besides being an inventor, Edison was a manufacturer, a businessman, and a founder of organized research as well as one of the most colorful and paradoxical personalities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
2006 - (Lilly)
Our 2006 bot was named for Lillian Gilbreth, industrial engineer and expert in motion studies. Lillian was a pioneer in recognizing the interrelationship between engineering and human relations. She understood -- and convinced industrial managers and equipment developers -- that the behavior and efficiency of individual workers was often the product of the quality and effectiveness of the work environment. Her ideas helped encourage the development of
industrial engineering curricula in engineering schools, and her ideas about the qualities that produce good supervisors and what kind of workers were best suited to particular kinds of work was equally innovative, and contributed to the growing field of career assessment.
Gilbreth developed many of her ideas and co-authored numerous books and scientific studies with her husband, Frank -- and while doing so, she had 12 children in 17 years. When she was widowed, she carried on managing the company she and her husband had formed and managed to put all of her children through college. Gilbreth continued to apply the principles of modern business methods to the home, and published two books about the topic, The Home-Maker and Her Job and Management in the Home, as well as many articles in popular periodicals about the topic.
Our bot "Lilly", is optimised for ball control. With speedy ball pick-up "gobbler" rollers and a hopper capable of carrying almost 40 balls. It also has an accurate shooter, again made with rollers, that can shoot 3 balls at a time to an accuracy of about 90% from 15 feet away from the center goal. The shooter can shoot 2-3 sets of 3 balls per second, and is almost completely camera controlled for its good accuracy. The shooter can also throw balls a short way so they fall into the hopper, we call this juggling and could be useful for blocking opponent's shots. Lilly's drive system is high-friction and has burned a carpet when held in place. It is also gyro-aligned and can drive in a straight line with less than 1 foot deviation. The gyro helps during our one of our nine autonomous modes:
Beware of what we churn out for next season...
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