We began discussing rules, prototyping designs, and assembling essential elements like the bump, chassis, and electrical system. Jared leading a group of students are busy prototyping a pneumatic kicker design. Returning as a mentor this year, Clinton and myself are setting up (read "troubleshooting" and/or "cussing at") the new control system and will be showing students how to program it for this year, including the camera and new operator console.

I have been mentoring several other students about establishing design goals to design and produce a kicker mechanism for the robot. After looking over the rules we concluded a kicker needs the following features: It needs to put enough energy into the balls to propel them up to 50 feet (across the field), but be adjustable to have an adjustable kicking distance so you can kick the soccer balls from close up. Since the robot will not be changing position often, the process of changing the target distance need not take less than 10 seconds for 40 feet. The kicker needs to have an accuracy of 2 feet and a precision of 2 feet from across the field, to get balls into the goal from far away. Autonomous period is 15 seconds long and a robot may be presented with up to 3 balls, therefore the combined process of acquiring a ball and kicking it must not take more than 5 seconds.

We observed a number of winch, pitching, kicking, and other mechanisms from a variety of sources. Since we are not allowed to fully hold the soccer balls, pitching wheel-like designs were out. Other pitching designs were considered however, like a spring-loaded lever to simulate underhand soft ball pitches. We examined an mechanical hammer machine designed by Leonardo da Vinci that would pound a piece of metal by rotating a crank, pushing down on a lever with a spiral cam (a combination of the lever, screw, and inclined plane simple machines).

To begin testing we decided modifying last year's robot would be ideal, it had a sturdy outer skeleton frame that could be used for rapid prototyping, has a gap in the front for a kicking mechanism, and the robot had already been scavenged for electronics to use this year (since the control system is being re-used). After designing a simple lever with a wooden kicker, held back with a latch and wound with provided surgical tubing, we could propel the ball at up to 50 ft/second along the ground and well over at least one bump (we only constructed one).

We will continue Monday testing a number of mechanisms to activate a quick-release and to pull the kicker back.