This year the team had the opportunity to go to SNHU for the kickoff of the 2018 robotics season. This event included many speeches from many local New Hampshire government officials which included Governor Chris Sununu and Senator Maggie Hassan. The event also included speeches from the two FIRST co-founders Dr. Woodie Flowers and Dean Kamen.

FIRST POWER UP Game & Season Materials: https://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/frc/competition-manual-qa-system

In FIRST POWER UP, two alliances comprised of six teams (three on each side) collect Power Cubes and place them on plates to control the Switches or the Scale on the field. Alliances work to control these field elements for as long as possible. Robots can also deliver Power Cubes to their human player to earn Power Ups, which are temporary advantages during the match. During the final 30 seconds of the match, the alliances try to climb the Scale. The first 15 seconds of the match is the autonomous period where the software controls the robots. The remaining 2 minutes and 15 seconds are the teleoperated period where the students control the robots. Click here to read the official FIRST POWER UP Overview

Following Kickoff, the team returned to the shop to start our strategy and design sessions. The very first thing we started with was reading the rules and making sure everyone understood the game. We then played a game in which our students pretended to be playing FIRST POWER UP. Some students were robots, and the rest of the team were the drive team. We do this exercise to really get a feel of what the game is going to be like when we get to our first competition. Day two of build season we started coming up with our priority list for this season. This meant determining what was the most important tasks for us to complete in this year’s game. After determining that, we were able to come up with a design for our robot. We broke into groups, each one coming up with a concept for our robot. We then came back together and weighed the pros and cons of each robot. From there, we came up with the design of what this year’s robot will be like. Once that was done, we were able to get into prototyping.

This season during week one we are developing a type of intake mechanism to deliver the Power Cubes from the ground to the Switch or the Scale. We are currently getting to the mid - final stages of development and are slowly tweaking what we have to intake multiple orientations of the Power Cube.

In addition to working on our robot and strategy for this season, the team is continuing to work on fundraising activities to help the team travel to our competitions. Our Cash Calendar raffle kicks off at the beginning of February, and each team member is selling tickets through the end of January.