Week 2 Update

Hey! We’re Ben and Jack, our team’s Technical President and Engineering director, respectively. It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the technical team, and we can’t wait to show off what we have! Here’s a brief look at everything we’ve been working on.

DESIGN

Our robot CAD, Computer Aided Design, has made substantial progress. We have conducted preliminary design reviews (meetings with the entire club going over the design and pinpointing potential issues) for each mechanism on the robot and are steadily chugging along towards a final design. We also completed a critical design review for the Coral Corral and have begun manufacturing the final product! It’s an exciting time to be a robot architect.

MECHANICAL

We’ve been deep into the prototyping process this week as we test geometry for our deep cage catcher and climb. Our Algae intake was also redone to fit the size constraints we were shooting for. The rapid prototyping has been accomplished due to our Laser Cutter as well as all 4 of our Bambu Labs 3d printers. Additionally, we finalized our Coral scoring mechanism and tested it on our completed field elements. Our homemade field is mostly aligned, and we’ve completed the superstructure of the beast that is the barge.

PROGRAMMING

There’s always something to do for our programmers! The beginning of the season has been busy as we update firmware and integrate new systems, such as a more efficient autonomous path planner or automated alignment using cameras. Now, as the team begins constructing final robot mechanisms, we will start bringing it all to life. 

With that, we’re super excited to unveil our 2025 robot, Tecuitlatl! While it's not a final product yet we can't wait to see it tearing up the reef.