195 CyberKnights | Behind the Bumpers | FRC REBUILT Robot

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02][music] >> We're here with team 195, the CyberKnights, at the New England District Championship event. They're going to help us get behind the bumpers [music] on their robot, including their intake system, their collector, their indexer, and their shooter, [music] showing why they're able to put so much fuel up in the hub and seed high at this event. We're going to get behind the bumpers coming up next.

[00:00:27]Starting with our intake in the front, we're going to move our way through the robot, traveling the path of the ball.

[00:00:33]So, our intake is an over the bumper slap down intake.

[00:00:37]And it points just like that. We deploy off an X60 mounted in the bottom of our robot. It uses a planetary with a 9:1 and then two 3:1s.

[00:00:47]This allows us to deploy it really fast as a motor spins it out really quickly.

[00:00:51]We want it to deploy fast, especially during auto.

[00:00:54]Now, we do have three polycarbonate rollers up front. One is down on the bottom as a kicker, and then two are up front. The two up front use silicone as it grips the ball a bit better.

[00:01:06]Um, and then the one on the bottom doesn't as the silicone was getting caught on the bump when we go over it, so we took it off. It's a powered by one Kraken X60 on a roughly 3:1 gear ratio.

[00:01:15]This allows us to have enough torque to pull in many balls at once, but also allows us to intake balls incredibly fast, just like this.

[00:01:27]These balls then get passed off to our moving floor system. These are use the West Coast Products stub system, uh, stub roller system with carbon fiber rollers covered in silicone. Um, these are all powered off of one Kraken X60 mounted under the moving floor, so it's out of the way and tucked away nice and safe. Uh, these run on almost a 1:1 gear ratio, so they're incredibly fast and push the balls super hard into our uptake, so we have a high balls per second.

[00:01:53]Before we get to our next segment, we'd like to thank the following.

[00:01:56]Kettering University's cutting-edge programs and their experiential co-op model seamlessly blend the professional and academic worlds, offering hands-on, future-focused learning that empowers students to pursue new ideas and inspires other institutions to follow their lead. Don't just be ahead of the curve, create the curve. Get more information at kettering.edu/first.

[00:02:16]FRCT's managed store program [music] is an easy and profitable way to fundraise for your team or off-season event.

[00:02:21]FRCT's will handle everything from production, packaging, bulk or drop shipping, payment collection, and accounting. Teams can set their own prices, and FRCT's will take care of the rest. Fill out a quote request or get more information when you schedule a callback at frcts.com.

[00:02:37]Moving on to our uptake system, we use six carbon fiber 1-in diameter carbon tubes, and we are also have silicone on them.

[00:02:48]And these these are These are powered by two Kraken X60s, and this allows [music] us to feed our shooter um And then moving up to our shooter, we are using a 4-in titanium drum and a 1:1 flywheel that is made out of brass, and on our back we have two, uh, carbon fiber rollers also on a 2:1 ratio from our shooter.

[00:03:24]And this allows us to shoot very a lot of balls very fast.

[00:03:31]Okay, so moving into the electrical, for our CAN bus, we use the Anderson powerpole connectors.

[00:03:38]These connectors have spring-loaded silver contacts, so they ensure that we don't lose CAN when we're going over the bump.

[00:03:44]That being said, they're not rated to go down to 22-gauge wire like what we're using for our CAN bus. They're rated down to 18-gauge, so we fill the back of the connector with hot glue, which has helped a lot with the strain relief, and we haven't had any issues with that this season.

[00:03:56]So, if we flip the robot up, this year, since we knew that our moving floor was going to cover a lot of our belly pan, we have all of our electronics mounted upside down in our belly pan.

[00:04:08]Um, and then underneath this silver plate is a Mac Mini. So, with this Mac Mini, we're powering and running, uh, four ArduCams. Off the back of the ArduCams, we have Molex and SL connectors since they're locking connectors. And then we're also running our robot operating system, ROS 2.

[00:04:26]So, we use ROS 2. That stands for Robot Operating System 2. And what that allows us to do is split all our subsystems into individual nodes. So, we have a shooter node, an intake node, and a lot of other nodes that all can send messages back and forth to one another to help communicate. This is really good for us because if one node crashes, our code will still work perfectly fine.

[00:04:51]In addition, we're running Photon Vision off of these four ArduCams, so we send it to the Mac Mini. And then if any of these cameras catch two April tags, we fuse that with our odometry data to have full awareness of where we are on the field at all times during the match.

[00:05:10]For autos, we use Path Planner.

[00:05:13]And after we create a path in one of the corners, we created something called the flip script, which helps us flip it to all the other corners. Or if we need to change an auto, we can flip it to all four corners, ensuring that our auto stay the same no matter [music] what.

[00:05:27]Once we create an auto, we have a simulation that we run it in, where we have the field 3D along with, uh, model of our robot, which shows us whether the subsystems are running and whether we're going to make any catastrophic errors like [music] slamming right into the hub, so that we don't realize that on the field.

[00:05:46]Now, for our driver controls this year, we decided to make it so that one driver could basically play the game by himself. So, we have this custom button box. And what this has [music] is the two flight sticks and these two buttons.

[00:05:59]This button over here is extra important because this is our auto shoot button.

[00:06:03]So, when we press the auto shoot button, we use our location on the field to calculate where we need to turn to in order to face the hub. We turn there, and then once we turn there, we put our swerves into X mode, so they all point towards the center so that we're less affected by defense.

[00:06:19]And then once we're pointed there, we use a map of distances to shooter and hood angles to find the power that we need to run our shooter and set our hood. And once everything is all set and we're facing the right direction and ready to go, we run the uptake and we start shooting. This also works for lobbing, [music] so if we're in the center of the field, it knows to lob based on its location.

[00:06:41]If we go over to here, we have the button box.

[00:06:46]And what the button box does is it only has a bunch of fail safes. So, if a belt falls off, we have a no belt button and many other buttons for if something goes wrong.

[00:06:59]This is our simulation or our dashboard, the Cyber Squire.

[00:07:03]And on the Cyber Squire, we have a lot of tools for our drivers. So, one tool is our autonomous preview, which shows a GIF of the auto and how it's going to run. Another one is this robot warnings.

[00:07:15]So, if anything is wrong with the robot, any component broken or any motor crashing, it'll show up in the robot warnings column, [music] so that our drivers are alerted as soon as it happens. And lastly, this big bar in the bottom, during the match, it lights up when we're active and gives a countdown [music] for how long we have until the shift changes, even if we're inactive.

[00:07:34]One last thing we do is we collect logs.

[00:07:37]So, throughout the match, we're tracking every single message sent in between our nodes and all four cameras' video, and we're saving that into a file. Then after the match ends, we can extract the file and watch back all the logs to see what would happen, like what happened to the robot, what the messages were sending, and it really helps us to troubleshoot issues [music] very quickly.

[00:08:00]Neat. So, this robot looks a little bit different than it did at the beginning of the season.

[00:08:05]What changes have you made since the beginning of the season and how has it helped you?

[00:08:10]Yeah, so at the beginning of the year, there's about two big changes we made since then. So, the first big one was our intake. We originally started with a rack and pinion deploy system, um, and used four polycarbonate rollers on the front. We decided to swap this out as we were having some issues with the deploying mechanism and our intake getting, um, stuck and breaking on hits.

[00:08:29]So, we decided to swap to this system, as well as the fact that this one being lighter and overall more robust. Another thing we swapped from was our shooter, which Adam will talk about.

[00:08:38]Um, so moving over to our shooter, we originally started with a four-lane shooter. However, this was not fast enough for our likings. We found that we were getting stuck on the lanes, so we just took out the lanes and moved to a drum shooter.

[00:08:55]Um, this allowed us to shoot more balls per second. This went from about 15 balls per second to, uh, 25 balls per Well, that is pretty cool. Thank you so much, 195. Good luck with the rest of your event, and good luck at any other competitions you might have this year.

[00:09:12][music] Thank you so much.

[00:09:15]Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and click the bell to stay up-to-date on future fun videos.

[00:09:21]FRCT's managed store program is an easy and profitable way to fundraise for your team or off-season event. FRCT's will handle everything from production, packaging, bulk or drop shipping, payment collection, and accounting.

[00:09:33]Teams can set their own prices, and FRCT's will take care of the rest. Fill out a quote request or get more information when you schedule a callback at frcts.com.

[00:09:41]Kettering University's cutting-edge programs and their experiential co-op model seamlessly blend the professional and academic worlds, offering hands-on, future-focused learning that empowers students to pursue new ideas and inspires other institutions to follow their lead. Don't just be ahead of the curve, create the curve. Get more information at kettering.edu/first.

[00:09:58][music] to destroy