The garbage truck

Above is the robot I built at its current state although I am constantly tweaking and improving. In the front of the robot there is a contraption that I call the rake that picks up the orange balls that you can see scattered around the field. The rake is attached to a sort of conveyor belt that I can  move up and down with a remote control. Once the rake is all the way down I can drive the robot into the balls to get them in the rake. After they are in the rake I put the rake all the way up to dump them in the bucket in the back. When the bucket is full I can then score points by backing up into the pipe fence and dump the balls like a dump tuck onto the other side and score one point per ball. In upcoming posts I will show videos of me practicing driving the robot.

The VEX Competition

I'm in a robotics competition called VEX IQ and this years challenge is called challenge bank shot.
The photo below is the field where the competitors drive their robots. The main part of the competition is two person diver control in which two different teams participate for shared points. They way it works is that after the points are scored each team gets that amount of points even if one team did nothing. This is evened out because there are multiple rounds. One way to score points is to get the orange balls on the opposite side of the pipe fence in the back for one point each. Another way is to shoot balls in the blue bucket in the back for three points each.The last two ways are emptying the cutouts on the blue ramp in the front for one point each and  having one robot completely on the ramp for ten points and two robots for 25. Each round is one minuet and the goal is to score as many points as possible. It is a fun challenge and I will be showing and explaining my robot in future posts.