2046 Bear Metal | Behind the Bumpers | World Finalists

追加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:02][music] >> Hello fun nation. My name is James checking in here with team number 2046 Bear Metal here at the First Championship. Incredible [music] robot with two district event wins. They won the Pacific Northwest District Championship as well as the Alliance captain [music] and a really great robot to show for it. Really strong hopper floor, the large big dumper robot archetype. A lot to learn from here from Bear Metal. With me I have Isaac, Matthew, Natick, Tess, and Hunter. Let's find out more on Behind the Bumpers.

[00:00:34]All right Isaac, why don't we get it started? Let's talk about a general robot overview here. Yeah, of course.

[00:00:38]So, just going through subsystem by subsystem. Starting off, we have our collector. Our collector is powered by two Kraken X60s so that we can always intake fuel as fast as we drive into it.

[00:00:50]And fuel goes up through here. We have two sets of rollers that make initial contact covered in cat tape tongue.

[00:01:01]And with an third additional roller that helps really pop the balls on up. The rollers are powered with stub axles for weight saving purposes in addition to increase durability.

[00:01:15]Additionally, for durability, our our collector does not have a front feeder bar as some teams have been calling it of aluminum stock. We found that through having just half inch polycarb with additional aluminum plates on that on the points of contact, we are able to have a resilient collector that does not break throughout the hardest hits without needing the additional weight of the feeder bar.

[00:01:44]Additionally, we have a two TPU mounts here for our upper little protector roller that prevents balls from flying out past our hopper.

[00:01:56]Before we get to our next segment, we'd like to thank the following.

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[00:02:17]FRC [music] Teams' managed store program is an easy and Speaking of our hopper, just going through that, we go out 11 and 1/2 in, a little over that, not the full 12, so that if our front plate does slightly flex, we do not exceed the full 12 in. So, additionally, to prevent flex or breaking, our hopper has >> [music] >> a double fold on the top polycarb in order to add additional rigidity.

[00:03:04]Um, additionally, on the hopper, we do use net in order to increase our hopper size.

[00:03:11]Uh, it is able to extend up and we are able to hold around 70 to 80 balls when we are fully loaded up and around 50 to 60 and still be able to go under the trench.

[00:03:23]Now, in order to get the balls from our hopper all the way up into our shooter, we have our hopper bed. Our hopper bed consists of 11 rollers, each powered with a 21 to 20 pulley gear ratio, so that our back roller is spinning faster than our front roller, allowing for additional uh grip and pulling the balls through faster. Additionally, the belts are slightly loose. We have around 0.03 of slack between each belt, so that we can draw less current. The the hopper floor also is able to pivot upwards allowing us to access the battery underneath in order to maximize storage space as we can see here.

[00:04:18]So, once we get the balls through into our front roller here, you'll see we actually use a S-shaped superstructure.

[00:04:28]While many teams are using the J-shaped superstructure in order to try and reach a higher DPS. For our findings, the difference between a J and a S curve were pretty negligible and the S curve allows us to fit our drum here up at the very end and have allow for a little bit more room in our our hopper bed to store even more fuel. Additionally, we only run one roller powered by two Krakens to pull balls up and through. Rather, initially we had multiple rollers but found out that only one would allow us for a higher throughput with less jamming. In addition to giving us once again more hopper volume. Bringing it up to our shooter, we have a four we have a 4-lb 4-in wide aluminum drum that is covered in cat's tongue tape. This drum spins at a little over 3,000 rotations per second and allows us to average at around 24 to 25 BPS with peaks of up to 29 to 30.

[00:05:34]It [snorts] is powered by four Kraken X60s and has a hood on the back that is that is not that's powered by X44. The hood actually does not have any rollers on it as we found that actually for us when we added rollers the accuracy of our shots did decrease.

[00:05:55]Additionally, this hood can vary from -10 to 60 degrees. At 60 degrees we are able to pass nearly bump to bump and at -10 degrees we are actually able to shoot backwards which allows us when there's heavy defense to go up against the hub and then fire backwards and fully lock our wheels in order for defense to have no effect on us.

[00:06:24]Moving it on to Matthew who here can tell us a couple more details about our design.

[00:06:29]With that for this year in particular we wanted to maximize [music] both simplicity but also maximizing scoring potential.

[00:06:37]We'll talk about our strategic priorities later but one of two of those strategic priorities was the highest possible throughput [music] with the highest amount of volume per per unit of time spent developing the design.

[00:06:50]With that a few key things that we haven't pointed out yet is is that we have a very robust iteration system.

[00:06:59]With that we actually developed five different robots this year each of which has a [music] vastly different different um use for. Our first robot was our alpha bot which is a wooden prototyping bot that we use for iterating wooden prototypes as well as developing our bread and butter.

[00:07:17]When it comes to developing our architecture we really wanted to make sure that we are getting the right things pointed out. One of the biggest things that we found off of the kickoff is we found that throughput could be a questionable thing. We knew that turret versus drum would be a pretty huge question for this season and we wanted to make sure that we are hitting target throughput numbers. We'll talk about those numbers later but with that moving on to our second robot this is our beta bot. We started development around week one, week two, which was following a SDR review, which is our systems definition review, where we detailed to the entire team what exactly the architecture will be developing for that year.

[00:07:54]Um with that, our beta bot was actually a rectangular triple shooter, [music] and this is prior to the release of the competition concept, which coincidentally also happened to be a triple shooter. Um with that, it was vastly different in terms of architectural decisions, such as having back side and mounting for our electronics, as well as a rectangular chassis with space for an L3 climber. Um we didn't want to give up the L3 climber too late too early into the season, as we wanted to leave that option open, as well as leaving space for an L3 climber to us automatically left space for an L1, which we thought could be strategically viable, but we'll evaluate later as to why that wasn't necessarily the case. Um with that, we found a lot of issues that helped with our iteration cycle, particularly finding that high current draw was going to be a huge problem with this year. We had to throughout the process of the season develop iterations that will reduce current draw as well as increase throughput. With that, that follows into our competition beta bot, which was actually our pre-week one competition spec robot. This was developed between week three to week five, um and one of the key findings that we found is we are still drawing way too much current. Our initial competition beta bot on total startup while we're shooting um drew around 300 amps continuously, which was a big problem. Um this was a two channel shooter as we were also concerned about the accuracy of a triple shooter. We found that with our initial iteration of our beta bot, we actually had a static hood as well without powered rollers, and we found that the flexing in the back of the hood would actually cause problems in our shooting angle, which led to further iteration onto our final robot.

[00:09:28]But with that, we kind of strayed away from having more hoods, and we decided to go to lesser channels in order to have a higher effective balls per second necessarily than having a higher balls per second and missing uh missing more.

[00:09:40]Um with that, we move on to our Pterodactyl Mark II, which is actually our competition week one robot. This was an iterated version of our superstructure for our week one robot.

[00:09:50]Um we did not want to go with our competition beta bot because it simply could not operation operate at a competi- a competitive level um for what we wanted out of our week one event. Um with that, it styled a double shooter with an L1 climber spacing um similar to the crew if you may have seen them. Um they vectored into two different channels, and one of the biggest things that we found is that there was simply not enough throughput throughout the season. Um we were pretty good for week one, but we found that other teams such as Citrus Circuits were having a drum shooter with although less accuracy, the higher throughput compensated leading them to a higher average match score. Um with that, led to our week one to week three rebuild uh rebuild session. Um in a matter of eight days, we developed the CAD, fabrication, assembly, and programming of our drum bot between week one and week three. Um we had a couple snow days in between because the Pacific Northwest is random. So, with that, um we wanted to make sure that we were minimizing changes as well as maximizing our potential for throughput. With that, which was which is what led us to a fixed hood design. Um well, sorry, a fixed superstructure hood design as opposed to an active hood design. Um very few teams went with a fixed hood design for their superstructure um simply because I do believe that a lot of teams were just simply copying and rebuilding. Um we found that actually just less compression on your single roller and having minimal amount of force to lift your ball from the bottom of your hopper to the top was going to be the maximum amount of throughput you could possibly get. So, with that, that led us to that iteration. Um and from there, from week three forward, we've been iterating quite a bit. Um we've gone through at least three different iterations of our indexer, seven different iterations of our intake, two different iterations of our shooter, one iteration of our superstructure, and yeah. So, we'll pass it off to Nadek to discuss strategic priorities as well as the beginning of our season.

[00:11:40]Yeah, so at the beginning of the season when we analyze the game, we knew that a big part of this game was not only being strong in quals but also in playoffs. We were looking at multiple different strategies like passing or cycling, and we realized that in order to maximize both, we wanted to maximize our opportunities. This meant that essentially we wanted to focus on something that would not only give us a lot of throughput but also provide us a lot of volume in order to score the balls that we want to score.

[00:12:04]Um we also recognized that at the during our strategy that at the beginning of every single active shift we wanted to bring about a full hopper of balls because that was going to be the time where we'd have the least defense as the other team would be in their active period before that. Um with this, we developed a scoring calculator which allowed us to determine the best architecture and the best iteration path for what we needed to to find the diminishing returns point for each of our subsystems.

[00:12:30]The the cap strategy calculator essentially works by taking a lot of inputs and it essentially makes a calculation based on how much time it takes >> [music] >> to fill up your own requirements and constraints of your robot. This gives us a final amount of time based on a cycling cycling pattern of a robot and strategy which would get come brings us to a final score. Now, if you'll notice, there's an L1 buzzer beater climb and an L3 buzzer beater. This is This is because at the beginning of this season, we wanted to focus a lot on making sure that we weren't missing out on anything.

[00:13:01]Last year, we unfortunately were not able to perform at the highest level because we sort of left out algae in our initial strategy. So, this year instead of leaving things out initially, we wanted to make sure we were able to accommodate everything we wanted to do.

[00:13:13]Um however, in our strategy calculator, we noticed that an L3 was almost not worth it at all. Um even if it took you 5 seconds to climb to an L3, which is not really realistic, we realized that the amount of balls you could score in an Einstein's level would just mean that you would lose the match because you were wasting time trying to get those points. As opposed to a robot that can score 20 25 BPS and score the entire amount in almost 2 seconds.

[00:13:39]With this we were able to generate graphs to help our iteration process as well as deciding our architecture. Um these graphs essentially account for a sub a set amount of pre-constraints and then we altered each of those to develop a graph based on a changing x-axis of one particular subsystem. For example, the one you'll see right now is just a difference between the L3 base on a 10-second time as the total score changes. And we also have other graphs.

[00:14:06]Um we have things like our BPS. For example, you see a significant drop-off at about 25 BPS. This is because at 25 BPS you have other constraining factors >> [music] >> that are not going to take away as much of your cycle time as you would if you were to build a better collector instead of going for a 40 BPS per second.

[00:14:25]Um this let let us to our beta bot which we did which like Matthew and Isaac talked about, we designed to be as simple as possible just to test the most amount of things. Um in all in all our entire goal for the season was quality control for our robot. In past years we've been able to build incredible robots with when they perform. The keyword was when. We want to build a robot that would be consistent and reliable no matter what um in any situation that would lead us to not only qualifying high but also being very very good in playoffs. Um this meant revamping our entire hardware system. Last year we switched from an electronics team to an assembly separate subteam to a combined subteam. We also invited specialists to our team. Um we promoted members and essentially we had members solely focused on the quality that we were bringing on our robot. This meant quality controlling all the assembly, following CAD to the very last measurement, um quality quality controlling parts before they started as well as making sure every single part we put on the robot was correct and to spec. Um a big part of this was revamping our hardware system like I said. This meant that we were not only able to complete the robot faster as a result because [music] we weren't waiting for inter-subteam hand handoffs, but also allowing us to just perform at the best level, the most consistently as possible.

[00:15:35]Um the biggest part of our robot assembly-wise is our superstructure.

[00:15:38]This took about a day and a half to assemble, down from the week and a half it was for our competition beta beat.

[00:15:44][music] Um it's we simplified it so so much. There's one roller and there's one drum, and this allowed us for someone a day and a half, and this was by far the most complicated part of the robot.

[00:15:53]Our chassis is also super simple. It's just four tubes with one cross tube and a 1/16 belly pan where all the electronics are underside mounted, um which uh one of our members Justin can talk about.

[00:16:05]Yeah, so for our electronics this year, like we were saying, we are trying to make the at least amount of problems or complications in a competition. So, to be able to limit those factors in having issues, we made sure that our wiring was bottom-sided wiring. Originally, like we said in the beta bot, um there was wiring mounted all on the back including our Rio and some other components and our um all of our main [music] power sources, everything all on the back. We saw that through just testing and different like thoughts of how we compete in a higher level that due to that we would be easier off having our electronics underside which we have done in past years. Part of that was making sure that we design highly for electronics. We think ahead of time.

[00:16:52]Like as soon as we know what we need and what type of chassis we're going to have, we're starting to plan for electronics >> [music] >> because we don't want to get halfway through the season and be like, "Oh shoot, we don't have something that [music] we need." So, part of that is being able to make schematics for all of our robot parts. So, all when we get what we need, like learn that, "Oh, of course we're going to need a Rio." or when we find that we need to like get a certain amount of motors, we start to actually put it together where each port will go. So, we start planning that each port on the PDP is going to have where like a what radio, what Rio, what MPM, what motor.

[00:17:37]>> [music] >> Everywhere it goes is all connected here, which is also really helpful for when we are trying to problem solve [music] during competitions. We also plan out through this our drive to chain to our daisy chain through our drive and daisy chain through our mechanisms. So, we actually have two daisy chains. Our mechanisms are all on the Rio can fairly off of that and then all of our drive is off of the canivore so that we can update [music] as fast as possible.

[00:18:05]So, as you can see, we have all of our components, everything mapped out. And then, like I said for the bottom routing, we also plan out that exactly.

[00:18:12]So, here we can see all of our routing based off of where the motors will be on the robot and where we think it will go directly up to get to the top of our robot. So, in that you can also see right here we have some mounts. We worked on making 3D prints [music] for our electronics this year so that we're able to bundle each wire where we need and also having a second line to be able to have can separated from power. And if you turn over here, um this is our actual robot underside it which looks exactly like the photo. And even with being able to like rewire and [music] change things, it's quite similar to be able to like follow what we did on paper and be able to have it exactly on the robot, which is also really beneficial for if we rebuild or if we make a second robot exactly the same, which we do in most years. So, also making sure that, like you can see here, our can is separated from power, making sure there's less interference in all of these parts. Another [music] kind of important part of our electronics is making sure we are limiting the amount of action that like balls could hit. So, on the top side of our robot, we actually have um we have 3D prints that go over all of our Krakens. So, the Kraken casings normally have their regular covers, but we add a 3D print one to go over and to the like side of the wires so that we are able to have less hitting able to happen and [music] make our wires loose or have any issues like that, and it would just go over like that instead of the top case.

[00:19:48]Another part of our robot and wiring and making sure that we have less failures is that the fact that we don't actually do any soldering and crimping on our lengths of wires. So, nothing in between, no terminals connecting in between. We connect directly [music] right out the wire directly and then crimp a ring terminal on the end. So, all of our we have a pneumatic crimper at our shop where we are able to make [music] like actual full spec to a manufacturer crimp on the terminals for the Krakens. So, [music] we're able to we take the wire and just go directly up so we can properly have the right lengths and not be able to strain the wires and also know that there's nothing happening in between that could cause issues in the competition. Yeah, well, very interesting stuff there on a lot of different things around your robot and having such a mechanically and electrically impressive robot also requires a lot of programming. So, I think we're going to hand it over to Rod here to talk a little bit more about the programming you guys are doing. Let's talk about that. All right. So, one of the things we noticed in previous years on Bear Metal was we would do really well when we were working. Um I'm sure this has been echoed by the other subteams on our team, but that effort to be consistent has it extended into programming a lot this year, too. So, um this year I probably doesn't have to show code. Um this year we implemented a really strict architecture where we have a command based API for every subsystem and subsystems don't ever talk to each other. They only ever talk to the API that they're connected to and then APIs expose commands and triggers to link with other APIs and we bind that through I and robot container.

[00:21:23]The other [music] thing we do to make sure that we're reliable and consistent every match and this is something I can show.

[00:21:31]This is what we're doing here.

[00:21:35]We're very strict about logging just about everything that happens on the robot. So this is a log of our last match. We log our selected auto path >> [music] >> which comes in three parts. I'll talk about that in a second. And then we log throughout a match odometry including swerve odometry, vision updates and then a whole bunch of stuff about how the robot performed that match.

[00:21:56]Swerve states target versus requested.

[00:21:58]We can check target velocities and current draw from every one of our subsystems [music] and we have people from the programming team checking every match to see is every motor drawing exactly what we expect. That's a failure point that that's a symptom of failure that we've noticed a lot in the past [music] where a motor will draw way too much or not enough current if it's broken and so we can identify those failures before they become total subsystem failures.

[00:22:25]Um The other thing we did this year that was pretty cool with our autos. We split our autos up into three different paths each time.

[00:22:34]So our drive team during a strategy meeting and then on the field can select one of each of our three types of paths each match. So we have we use smart dashboard as our dashboard. Um And we have four choosers. One for Depot versus outpost side.

[00:22:53]You can see it'll update an advantage scope when we choose which side we're on.

[00:22:57]And then we get to adjust our first path.

[00:23:01]We have a set of [music] first paths that we can combine with anything else.

[00:23:04]Um and then our second path and our third path, depending on what the the match strategy um requires.

[00:23:13]Um Well, very interesting programming. Lots of important stuff there. Fair metal, so much interesting stuff to dive into here. Thank you so much for the time to learn about this today. Best of luck here the rest of the way at the FIRST Championship. Thank you all so much for watching. My name is James for the FUN Robotics Network, signing off.

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