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Thank you for your interest in supporting Raider Robotics!
This campaign has ended but if you would still like to support our team, you can make a gift at any time by visiting give.msoe.edu/donate and listing Raider Robotics as your area of support.
This past weekend, our team traveled to Indiana for the Purdue University Memorial Union Qualifier for our first event of the year! We were able to bring 10 students to the competition (one-third of our whole team), eight of which had never been to a college robotics tournament before.
Throughout our matches, we were able to gain invaluable information about how our robots performed compared to other teams. We were extremely surprised about how important the autonomous portion of the match was - teams were able to take a massive lead at the start of the game with their pre-programmed robot routines. Over the next few weeks, we will be investing lots of time to better improve the software running on our robots to help us gain an early advantage.
Before concluding our first tournament, we won the second-highest award in the competition, the Design Award. The design award is given to the team with the best team organization, project management, and overall design process. This award showcases the high-quality team and processes that we have created over the last three years, and has now qualified us for the World Championship for a second time this year!
Thank you to everyone who made this tournament possible. This is only the beginning for us - we're looking to attend multiple more tournaments, giving other members of our team the opportunity to attend a competition! This tournament taught us TONS about how to improve our team and our robots, and we were able to make many new connections with people on teams at UIUC, Purdue, Platteville, and others. We can't wait to see what else this season holds!
The above-pictured robot is last year’s robot. That season was our most successful season yet! We built two robots and won the Online World Championship. All in the middle of COVID.
The robot was designed to pick up balls off the ground and launch them out the top into goals. It was custom designed by our design team and is made of almost entirely 3D printed parts! It was the most advanced robot we had ever created. Utilizing a unique Holonomic Drivetrain, it was able to move and rotate in any direction it chooses. It also had a series of sensors on the bottom of the robot used to determine its location at any given time. Using that, we could draw a path on our computer, and our robot would follow it exactly. We also use the Robot Operating System (ROS) to program our robot. ROS is an industry-level software package specifically designed for robotics development.
Our team has always been built on the idea of creating something new. Last year we created innovative technologies that would be impressive at the industry level. This year, we plan to take it even further.
