FTC Robotics

The interesting problem that year was the arm. I took a telescoping arm architecture normally seen on much larger FRC robots and adapted it to FTC — shortening the stages and gearing down our substantially weaker FTC motors so they could still drive the arm in and out under load.

On top of that I designed a gear-driven mechanism that flips the whole arm through vertical, so the robot could intake scoring elements at the front and score them behind and above itself without turning around.

The arm modification fought us the whole way. Getting FTC motors to drive an FRC-scale telescoping mechanism took several iterations of gearing and stage length before it was reliable enough to trust in competition — but it did work in competition.

The hard problem was intake consistency. Our first designs only worked from a near-perfect approach angle, which meant the driver was spending the match lining up instead of scoring.

Several iterations of flexible plastic grabbers, together with a custom ramp and bucket, got us to an intake that took elements in reliably from a range of approaches. The bucket used servo-driven locks to hold the elements in place so it could be flipped back to score without spilling them.