Another great year for Trenton Robotics

This year the Trenton High School Robotic program grew to become the Trenton Public Schools Robotics Program with the addition of the new Boyd Arthurs Middle School TorquNados junior varsity Team.

The FIRST Tech Challenge team had a strong rookie year and is already planning for next year.

In sports we talk about having a “building year” after a large pool of senior talent graduates. Which was the case for this year’s TorquNados Team 5090 at Trenton High School.

“We came into the season after losing 12 seniors in 2022, leaving only one student with build room experience and one former programmer,” said coach Katherine Nelson.

Members who previously worked on the business and media side of the team along with 12 new rookie teammates stepped up to the challenge.

For the first time in team history a complete CAD design of the competition robot was completed before building began. This allowed the team to use engineering principles to do proof of concept modeling.

Each competition structure consists of 40 qualifying matches played by 40, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals.

Each match is a 3-on-3 game where student teams of difference schools have to quickly strategize game play in order to both win the match and make the most ranking points possible.

After regular match play alliances are chosen based on ranking and data gathered from scouting matches. The top eight highest ranking teams choose their alliance partners for the rest of the matches that will be played to determine a winning alliance. This means only the 32 teams chosen to be in an alliance move on to the quarterfinals.

At the FiM District Jackson Event at Spring Arbor College, Team 5090 finished 18th out of 40. The TorqueNados were the second pick for the #3 Alliance consisting of the Dexter Dreadbots and the Livonia Warriors.

With this strong Alliance they made it to the semifinals but were knocked out by the #1 Alliance. Due to our CAD work the team built the most complex robot in our history and pushed our engineering skill to new levels.

Due to their innovative use of sliders, their new swerve drive chassis impressed the judges and the TorquNados took home the Creativity Award.

Between their Week 1 and Week 3 competitions, they worked on their robot extensively. During the course of the competition, various parts of the robot broke. While they were easy fixes, it did take time.

During their second match, one of the grippers broke, making it nearly impossible to pick up game pieces and score above the low tier, although immediately after the match, the gripper was replaced.

After the competition it was discovered that the epoxy, that held the upper mechanisms to the chassis together, had cracked and caused additional sway and instability. The slider slowly detached and eventually there was almost nothing keeping the upper portions of the robot from coming off.

Between competition events the TorqueNados removed the upper mechanisms and changed the glue, used J-B weld, and also added tension cables to make everything more secure and relieve stress from the new, stronger epoxy.

Along with repairs, they also added new features and greatly improved some old ones.

First, they changed the entire design of the grippers, to make it easier to pick up game pieces, and specifically cones from the human player station.

They reprogrammed the arms of the robot to be more stable driving back and forth, and increased arm ratio from 100:1 to 318:1 to make the arm more stable and predictable, making it easier and more likely to be able to line up cones for the high bar. Weight was added to lower the center of gravity and increase the speed of the robot overall.

Due to those changes, the cycle time was reduced by 50 percent.

A light was also added that would signal the human player as to which item to prepare for the robot.

However, the physical aspects of the robot were not the only things improved.

Programmers worked hard to improve the coding for the autonomous part of the competition. The auton had gone from attempting to drop a cone on the high bar but only scoring about half the time, to going around the mid peg and placing the cone on the SEE ROBOTICS, Page 19