This year, due to the pandemic, FIRST® developed challenges to allow teams to work remotely. The INFINITE RECHARGE at Home (IRAH) challenge (details to be announced January 9th at Kickoff) will be some form of demonstration of our robot’s performance derived from the structure of last year’s game, Infinite Recharge. Our 2021 robot will be a revamped version of our 2020 robot, Darth Thunderous the Wise.
The goal of IRAH prior to Kickoff was to analyze all available data on our 2020 robot and develop a list of prioritized improvements to implement on the robot. In prioritizing improvements, they took into consideration the following factors:
- Added benefit of the proposed change to robot performance.
- Level of difficulty in design, fabrication, and assembly.
- Impact on other robot subsystems.
- Level of student enthusiasm.
To get to the priority list, the students, lead by a mentor, reviewed, analyzed, and documented our robot performance using all available practice footage and competition video footage to isolate weaknesses in our robot. In addition, they researched the performance of other teams that did well on the 2020 competitions before the season was cancelled. They developed datapoints of similar design characteristics across multiple high functioning robots that could be tested on our robot to improve our performance.
Once the final version of IRAH is detailed at Kickoff, this priority list will be revisited and adjusted based on any new strategic goals and the specifics of the judging criteria. We are very proud of our students’ work and can’t wait until Kickoff!.
