Slogging Through

Meeting 14 was last week. We had most of the team there, but with some of the things we had put in place previously in terms of organization, we were generally on task. One of the things we need to do, which was suggested by our assistant coach, is to have each group schedule a time during our meeting where they will have access to the robot. We have two robots, ours and the one belonging to another team. We share since we aren't there at the same time, so it makes a lot of sense to use each other's robots. Still, only two robots, when we have 4 teams of 2 or 3 people each, there is still a robot bottleneck.

Sometimes you can test things out in your head and build accessories and do other things that don't necessarily require the robot itself. Other times, you just have to run it and see what happens.

We have a few portions of the challenge that are there or at least close to there. One is the water filter, which is just pushing in a certain spot to slide the filter into place. Another is the rain. It requires driving at just the right angle and bumping the switch that drops the water. Those two are pretty much working. Another is the pump. That team kind of comes and goes in terms of how close they are, but it's pretty straight forward - just driving forward and hitting one of a couple different levers. Each of those three are close to the home base and just require a quick drive and pushing, sliding, or lifting a single switch. Another more complicated aspect of the challenge is removing and replacing the broken water pipe. That one is close, although we need to simplify it. Right now, he's trying to carry out the new piece, set it down to remove the old piece, and then he will pick up the new piece again and drop it into position. I think setting it down and picking it up again is going to be error-prone, so we need to talk about how to simplify that action.

There are several parts of the challenge that are missing from the board. I'm not totally sure if that is because they are just put away because they were broken or otherwise disassembled. The STEM Lab where we meet is used by several robotics teams, plus several other student groups like Odyssey of the Mind, and I'm sure there are others. The problem is that there isn't always respect for each other's things in there.

I did ask one of the team members to leave about halfway through, since he was not on task and was throwing things around the room. The kits are expensive. I'm sure we've already lost a few pieces due to things falling on the floor. As soon as they start throwing things, though, we're dealing with both losing the Lego pieces and damaging things that belong to other groups who use the room.