Building, testing and tweaking the MSET robot

With a completed computer version of the robot, the team moves back to reality to build, test and tweak their theories.

“At this stage, we are ordering final parts and the different subsystems are starting to look like the finished one,” robotics team president senior Stanley Yip said. 

Senior Todd Nguyen, a member of the robotics team, knows each step inside and out. The team begins the process with the first step, building the robot.

In order to comply with the standards set by the FIRST Robotics Competition, the team purchases parts for their robot from specific businesses that carry parts approved by FIRST.

“We order parts from places like AndyMark, which sells FIRST parts, like motor controllers, motors and other FIRST-chosen parts,” Nguyen said. “We get raw materials like sheet metal, plywood, acrylic and vinyl from hardware stores.”

The team uses a Shop Bot, a brand of a computer controlled router that is a 3D printer for flat sheet parts, to cut custom parts. The team gives the router a sheet of material and computer drawings and it cuts what the drawings tell it to.

“Shop Bot is really useful because we can make models of our parts on the computer, and then we can use plywood or plastic cut to the exact model that we made,” Nguyen said.

This year, the school is allowing the team’s mentors to utilize the tools in the woodshop room in order to cut parts.

“It takes a little longer than making the cuts ourselves. It takes about a day, because one of our mentors, Mr. France, is making parts for other people as well,” Nguyen said. “However,  we can also cut complicated patterns such as curves.”

After constructing the robot and putting the parts together, the team spends anywhere from one week to three weeks to test each mechanism of their robot.

The third step in building their robot is making small changes to the robot, or tweaking, in order to create a final product that runs smoothly.

“For tweaking, in previous years we've set up our carpet and field elements, such as goals and obstacles, in the cafeteria next to the small theater, usually during the February break,” Nguyen said. “February break is usually the last week of the building season, so we spend a lot of time tweaking the robot.”

Tweaking largely revolves around the software of the robot rather than the physical mechanisms of the robot.

“Most of the tweaking is software tweaking, which is done by senior Eugene Che and junior Alex Renda,” Nguyen said. “They optimize our controls for our drivers, and also automate certain tasks so that the drivers can focus more on the game.”

Due to the hefty time constraint, their robot cannot be drastically changed if needed during the tweaking process.

“If we have issues with hardware, we'll try and fix it, such as changing gears and adding structural support, but usually we can't make any major changes at that time,” Nguyen said.