As a robotics team, we must have a robot. We’ve participated in the past three seasons and have focused on designing for simplicity and reliability, rather than making something which is much more capable but unreliable. The robot is named Cipher each year, in keeping with our team name and wonderful mascot.
CENTERSTAGE
Pictured is Cipher from the FTC 2023-2024 CENTERSTAGE competition. It uses a scissor lift arm and a custom double claw to pick up pixels and place them on the backboard. This was the first year we designed a more complex drivetrain with gearing, instead of attaching motors to wheels directly. We also used mecanum wheels this year for the first time.
CAD Designs
All of our CAD designs are in Onshape. Many of these are unused because of our design process. They are all licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Into the Deep
This robot, our current iteration of Cipher, is perhaps our most ambitious project yet. Where previous designs featured a simple claw on a scissor lift arm, the current Cipher features a multiple-stage process for moving samples into baskets. We’ve found that being a sample robot in this specimen-focused season has worked very well and, with refinement, will only become more advantageous.