FRC Kickoff

By William Golub on January 7, 2017

Welcome to FIRST Steamworks!

First, a brief description from the manual: FIRST® STEAMWORKS, the 2017 FIRST® Robotics Competition game, invites two adventurers’ clubs, in an era where steam power reigns, to prepare their airships for a long distance race. Each three-team alliance prepares in three ways:

  1. Build steam pressure. Robots collect fuel (balls) and score it in their boiler via high and low efficiency goals. Boilers turn fuel into steam pressure which is stored in the steam tank on their airship – but it takes more fuel in the low efficiency goal to build steam than the high efficiency goal.
  2. Start rotors. Robots deliver gears to pilots on their airship for installation. Once the gear train is complete, they turn the crank to start the rotor.
  3. Prepare for flight. Robots must latch on to their airship before launch (the end of the match) by ascending their ropes to signal that they’re ready for takeoff.

For the game animation click here

Once the game was released, we met up to discuss our possible robot design strategies and evaluated the game and decided on the strategic value of each of the goals. From there we decided on two hypothetical robots that perform two sets of goals. We are set to begin mechanism protytping but were forced to leave school due to inclement weather. Students are hard at work outside of the shop thinking about robot and mechanism design, and we’ll keep you updated.

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