For the 2021 competition season, RoboLoCo participated in the the Game Design Challenge, where our team was tasked with designing the concept of a new and unique FIRST Robotics Competition game. After weeks of planning and hard work of going through the design process to create our idea and put our submission together, we recently submitted our game design for the FIRST Robotics Competition Game Design Team to see! The FIRST Robotics Competition game we came up with is called Operation Oil Toil, as can be seen by our logo design.

Operation Oil Toil invites teams to help save their precious FIRST sea by protecting their environment and cleaning up a dangerous oil spill. Teams must rescue fish, clean up the oil, and safely return back to the dock in order to accomplish their mission.

We have detailed designs for the layout of the field, as pictured below! Here is the top and side views of the field:

The ship in the middle of the field is called the SS Cleanup, and the yellow balls arranged on the field are representations of oil. In the middle of each circle on the field is a fish.

Each three-team alliance can help save their ocean ecosystem by cleaning up the oil spill. Robots help can clean oil spills by collecting oil and depositing them into the portholes along the side of the SS Cleanup. During autonomous, scoring the oil into the SS Cleanup is worth two points; it is worth one point during TeleOp.

Robots can also rescue fish by depositing them through the portholes into a bucket on the short side of the SS Cleanup. This represents the tidying of the ocean! The crew members in the Crow’s Nest on the SS Cleanup will have to reel the buckets up with the rotating wheel to dump the fish from the bucket into the Cleaning Chamber. There will be alliance-colored fish for alliances to score and neutral fish that can be scored by either alliance. Scoring one fish into the Cleaning Chamber is worth 10 points.

Lastly, the robots will have to return to the docks by climbing a slipway to reach their corresponding boats during the endgame. Parking behind the baseline is worth 5 points; climbing the slipway past the lower line is worth 20 points; and climbing the slipway past the upper line is worth 30 points.

The team leaders of RoboLoCo hosted our much-anticipated virtual interest meeting today to help recruit new members for our team. To inform the community about our interest meeting, we advertised virtual flyers across our team's social media platforms. We held our virtual meeting through a Google Meet where we began with an introduction to how FRC seasons are structured and covered the logistics of signing up. Each team leader then introduced themselves and proceeded to describe the responsibilities that their sub-team entails. To conclude our meeting, we shared a link to our virtual interest form and answered any questions our audience had. Pre-season recruitment has always been an inherent aspect of RoboLoCo, and we are thrilled to see what the new members will contribute to our team! Click the button below to view the presentation that outlines the topics covered in our virtual interest meeting.

View Presentation

Today our team leaders gathered round (virtually, of course) to discuss our plans for the 2021 season! We spent a great deal of time planning out how our offseason would look like. We decided that our primary goal for the 2021 offseason is to uphold the tradition of training our new members in CAD and programming before the build season kicks in. Due to the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, we started exploring options of how we can virtually initiate new members into the fold.

It was recently announced that Infinite Recharge will be replayed for the 2021 season. We evaluated our robot's performance in the previous season and discussed how we can optimize and improve the design of our robot for the 2021 season.

We discussed the possibility of virtually meeting with other FRC teams as well as new safety protocols addressing COVID-19. We also brainstormed ideas of how we as a team can give back to our community during these unprecedented times. Overall, it was a very productive meeting.