Talk:DEWBOT VI Bridgewater Battle

Necessary Repairs & Maintenance & Drive-Train

There are some necessary repairs needed. Also, some drive-train fixes & upgrades. I include these together. Suggest we:

• Pull all pivots. Add spacers between driven sprocket lower 1" bearing. Check condition and refurbish as needed. All treads will need to be changed (they're beat). I will order more treads.
• Remount magnetic absolute encoders to provide better protection to the connectors (e.g., rotate towards centerline). use wire-ties on these and other electrical connections.
• Replace Steering Jaguars with Victors and test.

Autonomous

Not effective yet. Main points seem to be:

• Sensor for kicking does not seem to be reliable.
• Angles for off-axis shooting need to be checked. They appear to shoot off-field is the robot is aligned to drive along the central ball column. I'll check, but we should test too.
• Keeping in a straight line by blind dead reconning is often ineffective.
• Keeping the possessor off seems to work better (insofar as something which doesn't work can be said to work better).

Possessor

We've got a adequate possessor for demonstrations. In the heat of competition, it is ineffective. We tend to lose the ball or else overrun it. We really cannot effectively herd balls into the goal either. This is an area which needs work for IRI. Not sure the vacuum possessor is better, but let's discuss.

Mirror

Looks really good, but we should:

• Verify that it stays within the frame perimeter.
• It would be good to have a means of raising it during competition. A servo might be adequate.

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