Over the past year, I helped design the robot of the L&N STEMpunks for the 2018 FIRST Robotics Competition: FIRST Power Up.

The goal of the game was to place yellow cubes onto “scales” to gain points (field pictured below). Its function is not dissimilar from a mode in various video games, where one team holds one or more points and gains points the longer they hold it. With 15 seconds to go, the robots are supposed to go to the middle and climb to gain extra points. For a full breakdown, see this video.

Unlike the OutReach Bot renders, I instead experimented with camera effects, swapping out textures, and using different materials.

This was the first time I had opened Solidworks Visualize, and I popped the model in with no one the wiser.

As you can probably tell from the coming models, this is a different mechanism than what we ended up with. The reason for this is how the bot performed in competition. This mechanism broke at our first competition, forcing us to play defense, which we were mildly sucessfull at.

For more photorealism, I have begun varying the depth of field that the camera has. This will most likely lead to cooler animations for the reveal video. In addition, I swapped out wood textures on the panels, as to remove the repeated photo that I had taken early on in the year.