August Newsletter – RoboJackets

RoboJackets by the Numbers

Cameron Loyd — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:41:45 +0000

RoboJackets is a prolific competitive robotics organization with a twenty-one-year-long history. In that time, we’ve grown from a small group of passionate students that wanted to build a combat robot to an organization of over 300 members working on five separate teams that travel to competitions all over the world. Take a look at a timeline showcasing our history and many other statistics showing how we pursue our mission to promote, educate, and advance the field of robotics.

RoboCup – August Spotlight

Cameron Loyd — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:41:43 +0000

RoboCup, the international competition centered around autonomous soccer, is an excellent opportunity for roboticists across the world to meet and collaborate. Our RoboCup team is taking that opportunity to collaborate with ThunderBots, the RoboCup Small Size League (SSL) team from the University of British Columbia. Pictured are our two teams at RoboCup 2019 in Sydney, Australia after a match. The scope of this collaboration is primarily to share knowledge. The teams have discussed a variety of topics to help each other perform better at competition, including Robot Operating System (ROS) architecture, kicker system designs, and preliminary radio hardware. More recently, the teams have been reviewing each other’s code pull requests on GitHub, giving both teams’ software members the opportunity to hone their skills by analyzing code written by other developers on other teams. The two teams are looking forward to deepening their relationship and collaborating more in the future.

RoboNav – August Spotlight

Cameron Loyd — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:41:43 +0000

RoboNav, formerly referred to as IGVC, is taking its drivetrain in a bold new (omni) direction. A typical IGVC robot in RoboJackets has two powered wheels and a caster to drive the robot through the course, but this year RoboNav is designing a swerve drive system. The main difference between a swerve drive and a more typical differential drive is that all the wheels are on individually powered casters, enabling the robot to change direction in place by simply rotating its wheel axles to match the desired direction. The team believes this will take them in a new direction that enables better maneuverability and offer a compelling challenge for the mechanical subteam that few teams in the IGVC space seek to solve.

RoboRacing – August Spotlight

Cameron Loyd — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 18:25:20 +0000

RoboRacing, the RoboJackets team dedicated to autonomous racing, is participating in a new competition this year: evGrand Prix. RoboRacing has participated in the International Autonomous Robot Racing Challenge and at Sparkfun AVC, in both the smaller classic autonomous vehicle competition and the autonomous power racing series. Because Sparkfun discontinued AVC in 2018, the team has been looking for a new avenue to participate in building racing robots on a larger scale. evGrand Prix is the latest competition the team has found to scratch the big autonomous car itch. Utilizing a standard go-kart base outfitted with a suite of sensors (pictured above), the team’s main challenge is developing software that can interpret this data in real time to make racing decisions, considering opposing racers on the track, at up to 30 mph. May the best driverless car win!

RoboRacing mechanical members working on the chassis of the new evGrand Prix go-kart

BattleBots – August Spotlight

Cameron Loyd — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 18:25:09 +0000

Last year in BattleBots, one of the large bots that participated in the hobbyweight (12 lb weight limit) division at Motorama was Apachi, an experimental bent-bar spinner with a shuffler-style drivetrain. The drivetrain worked exactly as intended and the robot pitter-pattered its way around its opponents. Its downfall was its bent bar weapon, which snapped in half after receiving a hit. An improvised chain-based weapon ultimately gave Apachi the (audience decided) victory in the hobbyweight rumble. Chonki, a new robot (shown above), is taking the lessons learned from Apachi and making another bot with a shuffler-style drivetrain. Chonki is a shell spinner, a weapon type which will benefit greatly from the additional 50% weight afforded by using a shuffling drivetrain instead of the typical wheels. If you’d like to see a video of Apachi in action, follow this link.

BattleBots team members working on Apachi’s drivetrain

RoboWrestling – August Spotlight

Cameron Loyd — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 18:17:03 +0000

RoboJackets has been participating in sumo robotics competitions for six years, starting with two remote-controlled sumo robots at RoboGames 2015 as a part of BattleBots. Since then, our sumo team has grown in membership and scope, participating in the annual All Japan Robot Sumo Competition in the autonomous division for four years. Pictured is the team at the 2019 All Japan Robot Sumo Competition in Tokyo.To better accommodate the change in scope from remote control sumo to fully autonomous sumo, the team recently separated from BattleBots into its own team: RoboWrestling. Pictured below is the robot the team brought to All Japan Robot Sumo in 2019, named Guccii. RoboWrestling will be iterating on this design to compete again in the next competition. Their name choice, RoboWrestling, reflects the team’s interest in eventually exploring other robotics competitions beyond sumo.

Guccii, the robot RoboWrestling took to competition in 2019