Team RoboWizz

The Into Orbit robot game has 16 missions and our goal was to accomplish as many of these as we can in the allotted 2.5 minutes. Each mission is designated with the number of points a team can get for accomplishing the task. We determined which missions to work on based on the following criteria: Missions that are  - closest to the base - closer to other missions - can score lot of points - easy and quick to accomplish - can be accomplished using passive or combined attachment The base is the area on the robot game board where we are allowed to touch the robot without being penalized for it. We chose missions that are close to base, so that our robot can return to base quickly for attachment change over. Selecting missions that are close to each other allows our robot to do multiple missions in one run without having to return to base. Selecting missions that can easily help us score a lot of points was also important. And, if the mission is easy and quick to acc...

Our robots, Opportunity and Curiosity, are relatively agile and boxy. Each robot uses two drive motors in the front and two caster ball wheels in the back. They both have 4 motorized attachment points which are controlled by two motors.  We have 3 sensors on them, 2 color sensors and a gyroscope. Our Boxy Design: We built both of our robots to be boxy so that we could easily bump against the wall to align the robot and to keep the wires inside the robot where it won't interfere with our missions. Sometimes (especially when the robot is carrying heavy attachments) our robot will constantly go at an angle despite the corrections in our program. When this happens we use our boxy outer panel to back up against the wall to make sure that we are going straight again. Before we had this design we also had another problem with our wires getting in the way of our missions. This boxy design helps ensure that these wires stay inside the robot. 1 motor=3 motor attachment places...

Robot Design To make boxy design for alignment against walls Put color sensors in front of wheels instead of behind the wheels to detect line ahead before crossing the line Put two ball wheels instead of one for better balance Use gyro to detect angle Attachment Design Decide whether passive or motorized attachment Use engineering design process to build and test our attachments Programming Make a backup copy of every program Use MyBlocks for every step that is repeated and use them to make a shorter program Group different tasks together Core Values Working together better Not talking over each other Letting everyone have a turn to speak Use voting to help with decision making as a team Project Learnt about space and technologies Learnt about space debris Learnt about electromagnets

Lowest Level:My Blocks We modularized our program into three different levels for consistency, ease of programming, and organization. The lowest level of our programs are the My Blocks. My Blocks are blocks that you can program yourself to do a function using the standard libraries. There are 6 total libraries, actions, flow control, sensors, data operations, advanced, and My Blocks. Some of the action blocks do not perform well on our robot because of certain factors such as the friction on the wheels, the weight of our robot, the varying motor performance, and other engineering factors. To accommodate for this, we designed our own action blocks that work better for our robot. We have 6 My Blocks as described below. MoveStraight_DOR:                                                 DOR stands for degrees of rotation. There are three inputs that this My ...

An electromagnet is a type of magnet in which the magnetic field is produced by an electric current. Unlike a permanent magnet, the strength of an electromagnet can be easily changed by changing the amount of electric current flowing through it. The poles of an electromagnet can be reversed by reversing the flow of electricity. How to build an electromagnet? It is fairly easy to build an electromagnet. All we need to do is wrap some insulated copper wire around an iron core. If a battery is attached to the wire, an electric current will begin to flow and the iron core will become magnetized. The magnetic field is perpendicular to the field of the electric current. If we want to make the magnet stronger, then we wound the coil more around the core. The more electric charge the battery has, the stronger the electromagnet is.  When the battery is disconnected, the iron core will lose its magnetism.  How to determine polarity of the electromagnet? The electric...

We use a 5-step engineering design process for constructing our robot attachments. However, before we start the design process, we first need to determine whether the attachment is going to be a passive or motorized attachment. If it’s passive then we need to know where it is going to attach on to the robot. If it’s motorized, we need to have a motor that can connect our attachment to the robot. Here's the engineering design process that we follow: 1. Know the restrictions : Some examples of restrictions for attachments are like it can’t extend outside of the base at start and it can’t be more than 12 inches tall. 2. Sketch a picture : Once we know our restrictions and whether it’s going to be a passive or motorized attachment, we can sketch a brief drawing of it. 3. Build : Based on our sketch of the attachment, we can build it using LEGO technic blocks. 4. Test : Once we have the attachment built and know what mission it is going to be accomplishing, we can ...

This season of FLL was an amazing one for our team and we had a great experience. FIRST came up with a great combination of simple to complex missions for the Into Orbit robot game . One of our favorite missions was Escape Velocity. We loved h ow it could shoot up in the blink of an eye and land smoothly on the top with the launch of the hard striking pad. It was also one of the missions that was close to base, and simple enough to help us score 24 points quickly . All we needed to do was add some weight on the part of our robot attachment that would strike the striking pad, then align our robot with the south wall to go straight, drop the weight on the striking pad to launch the rocket and then come back home straight at full speed. Done ! So, for this mission our robot attachment design was simple - like an upside down U, but it had 90 degree edges, and on top towards the left side, we put some heavy weight, like a rectangular, flat, wide surface area because that part wo...

After winning Champions Award (3rd place) at the East Massachusetts State tournament, we got nominated to represent Massachusetts at the FLL International Open at LEGOLAND, California. In order to offset the costs involved for the trip as well as to help STEM education in our community, we have started fundraising activities. We shared our presentation at the school committee meeting and it was well received. We also contacted the local Public Library to set up a time to do an activity with the broader community and library members and started planning for a robotics day. During class this week,  our team decided to move one of the robot tasks earlier in its sequence. It took us 30 minutes to reprogram our missions. Next we started working on a promo video to help with our fundraising efforts. We took the famous song "We will, we will rock you", modified the lyrics to create a parody and then took turns singing and recording it with our own background music. After that we add...

     Our team had been working three times a week for a non-stop, 4-8 hour session since the Newton qualifiers in preparation for the State tournament on Dec 15th. Now the day we had been looking forward to had finally come. We reached the venue around 7:30 am and quickly set up the pit - an area where we relax in between robot matches and judging sessions, keep our stuff, and explain to other people and teams what our science project was about. Then we started looking around for other teams we had met through out the season. In the past few months, we had made friends with other teams from Ashland, Acton, and Newton.We quickly identified where each of these teams were and chatted with them for a bit. After some time, our coach left for the coaches meeting while we explored other team projects which included interesting topics such as materials for astronaut space suits, a spinning growth chamber to grow plants in space etc.      Before we knew it...