Soon after the unveiling of this year’s competition, Recycle Rush, we began brainstorming everything from game strategies to designs for our robot. We have met every day and have made plenty of progress in striving towards building a robot that will be proficient in this year’s competition.

This last week, we have spent a great deal of time fine tuning our strategy and coming up with various ways on how to achieve the tasks we want to perform. We have built many prototypes out of wood and aluminum, trying out multiple ideas brought up by team members. We worked on prototypes for collecting totes from the ground along with prototypes for stacking the totes. For collecting totes, we had the general idea of wheels pulling the totes into the robot. For stacking the totes, we built a mechanism using pistons to lift the them up. Next, we created a pair of claws, cut specifically to fit into the grooves under the lid of the totes, to hold the totes. These claws were attached to motors with a chain. We learned that this prototype failed to lift the totes any other way but right side up.