On October 8, the N.E.R.D.S. team met at Mr. Gerald Nelson’s house for the regular Saturday meet. The attending members were Michael Burke, Caden Peck, Mr. Nelson, Chris Nothstine, Kevin Henggler, and new member Nathan Meyer. Nathan’s brother and mother observed the meet for a short time as well.
The meeting began with explaining the rules of the challenge to Mr. Meyer. Team members were introduced, and the points that the team had decided to focus on mainly were told as well. (The team so far has planned to focus mainly on firing the cap and point balls into the center vortex, and claiming beacons and parking in the autonomous period.) After these rules and strategies were explained, Mr. Nelson shifted gears into more in depth explaining the mechanics of Vuforia. To learn about Vuforia, please visit our previous posts. Vuforia is an image tracking program designed to focus on an image in its database and track it. The team learned that it can be used in this year’s robotics challenge to track and locate beacons in autonomous period. It does this by locating the picture or pictures in its database that it is told to locate and orienting itself to track and find the target picture using X, Y, and Z coordinates. Once Vuforia loses contact with a target image, it will try and find a new target image, or the same, unless otherwise instructed. The images also can be used to give Vuforia a reference point in X, Y, and Z coordinates so it can know where it is in the arena. After Vuforia was covered, we discussed robot weight. We decided that the robot would need to be heavy to stay balanced and weighed down when transporting cap balls. We could not afford to have the robot tip over in the arena during the challenge. After all this was discussed, we decided to document and dismantle the old robot from last year’s challenge. Below are the photos of the old robot before the dismantling.
If you would like to see more photos of the old robot, please visit the N.E.R.D.S. media library.
Although it was a bit saddening to see the founding creation of the N.E.R.D.S. being taken apart, the team knew that its parts would create the hopeful victor of the future First Tech Challenge.