My senior year at Sidney High School was also the rookie season for FIRST team 1691. We took our robot, Musculus, to the 2005 Colorado Regional for Triple Play.
The field held nine goals arranged in a square. Robots scored by placing large PVC tetrahedrons inside them or stacking the pieces over their tops. Our robot carried a folding, crane-like hook for picking them up. I got a company to donate the linear rails, and we mounted the assembly on them so the hook could slide into position instead of making the whole chassis do every part of the alignment.
Sideways
I programmed the drive. Each large omni wheel had a row of smaller rollers around its rim. The wheel could drive normally in one direction while those rollers let it slip sideways in the other. With several of them under the chassis, the joystick could move the robot laterally without first steering the nose around.
That mattered around a crowded grid of goals. The hook still needed to meet a large, awkward game piece, but the driver could correct the robot’s position directly instead of turning, moving, and turning back.
The test ride
The most convincing test was also the least official one. The bare chassis was large and solid enough to sit on, so one of us climbed aboard while another drove it around. We could slide it sideways and spin it under joystick control with a passenger on top.
We should not have been riding the robot, but we did.
The next frame
The next winter I came back. I had graduated, and the team was building its second robot, X-Bot, with a NASA and Montana Space Grant Consortium grant behind it. The Sidney Herald story that February names me as a principal member of the previous year’s team, returning to help, and when the robot was finished I was in the team photograph beside it. That is most of what I have from that year.