2022/2023 - Charged Up season Recap

For many seasons now Team Rembrandts has been actively participating in the FIRST Robotics Competition. Year after year it’s always great to see how the team improves and how students are able to develop themselves. This year Team Rembrandts hit a very special milestone. This was our tenth season of competition, and looking back it’s crazy to see what we have achieved over the years and how much we were able to achieve in just this season alone!

For anyone interested, below we wrote a small recap of many of the things we did the past season and all things we accomplished:?

Skills Classes

Within Team Rembrandts we truly believe that everyone can reach their full potential while being part of the team. The path to unlocking this potential is different for everyone, however, to make sure all students get equal chances to develop themselves in any subjects of their liking we offer a Skills Class 1 (SC1) curriculum to all our new students.

In these skills classes we cover all parts of FIRST , from strategy, to mechanical design, to software, to marketing and communication and much more! Also together with our SC1 group we simulate a sort of build season within the off-season, to ensure they all have the confidence to partake with working on the actual robot in the build season as well!

After completing SC1, students can dive deeper into departments and subjects of their liking through department specific Skills Class 2 (SC2) classes. Ensuring that we maintain growth within both our students and our team!?

Team REV

As of this year Team Rembrandts officially became a Team REV team. As a team REV team we have been even more active on our socials than we already were. Constantly promoting and reviewing REV Robotics products, making #TeamREV posts and much more. In addition to this we were also involved with the beta testing of REV products, most notably the REV MAX Swerve Modules. During the 2022 off-season we rigorously tested the REV swerve modules and constantly gave feedback back to REV. When the swerve modules were delivered to us, there wasn’t any code written for it yet. Our software department was able to fully code the REV swerve modules 2 weeks before REV released their official code for the product. Lastly, on the release day of the REV MAX Swerve Modules REV even used our promotion video of the product as their official release video. All in all, building a sustainable partnership that will last for years.?

Pit

This year we also completely redesigned and remade our pit from scratch. Instead of having two seperate pit segments forming a corner in your pit area, we opted for only having one pit segment with a hinged top half to form the full back wall of the pit. In this way it’s much easier to both transport and set up our pit, as well as making our pit much more spacious during events. Also, this allows for easy transport of the pit during the event itself, for example when we have to move it for playoffs.

In the past we always shipped our pit back and forth to and from the States. However, as of this year, our new pit has been fully imported into the USA, saving us a lot of hassle with customs each year and especially saving us thousands of dollars in yearly shipping expenses.?

Partner events

Team Rembrandts has a slightly different sponsor vision than some other teams might have. We don’t work with grants or with sponsor, but more so with long term partnerships. We only work together with companies that are intrinsically interested in us as team and we our best to also give back to them as well. One of the things we do to improve the connection between us as team and them as companies is partner events. These are events such as our partner kick-off or our robot reveal where we invite both friends and family as well as partnering companies. The main goal of these events is to together all have a good time and create closer connections between the groups as a whole, while simultaneously informing everyone on the plans for the season and getting them interested in the new game.

This year our two partner events were finally able to be held again after the troubles of covid the previous years. Both events were well visited, attracting around 200 people each, and everyone had a blast!?

FTC?( FTC Benelux )

In the Netherlands, or in Europe in general, FIRST isn’t as big as it is in the States. We know what it means to be a part of FIRST and we truly believe in its value. Therefore, Team Rembrandts does everything in its power to better the FIRST scene, specifically the FTC scene in the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands & Luxembourg). Together with the organization SteamUp (whose board is also largely made up out of Team Rembrandts members) Team Rembrandts organizes FTC in the Netherlands and makes sure the FTC scene both becomes more sustainable as it is now, becomes better in quality over the years, and grows in numbers over the upcoming years.?

Team Rembrandts does this through a number of initiatives. Not only do we do the majority of volunteering in the Benelux and give both in person as well as online masterclasses, as of this season we also started with so-called FTC playgrounds. These are building/Q&A sessions where we invite 5-6 different FTC teams over to our shop, giving them the opportunity to connect with other FTC teams, improve their robots with all the tools available at our shop, and ask a number of FTC alumni questions on all areas of FIRST /FTC.?

Robot

This year we made our tenth robot yet. I wasn’t only our tenth robot, but also our most complex robot yet. The fun thing about this years robot is that we actually gave it a ‘downgrade’ for worlds. This year our regionals robot consisted out of an off the floor intake that could pick up both game pieces in any orientation, an indexing system that we called the ‘Spindexer’ that could perfectly orientate the cones for further use in the game, a REV MAX swerve drivetrain, a superstructure with a telescoping arm on a top pivot, and lastly a both motorized as well as pneumatic gripper as end effector.?

While this system worked very well and was quite a cool piece of engineering, it sadly didn’t fit the game. Originally we thought we would be picking up many game pieces from the ground. Hence the intake that could pick up both game pieces in any orientation and hence the spindexer. However, in practice we mostly cycled between the dual human player station and the grid.

This made our intake and spindexer a bit overkill. For this reason we completely redid our intake as well as removing the spindexer for worlds. Replacing the heavy cone and cube intake from the regionals for a very light and quick cube intake for worlds. Also we replaced the spindexer for a basket we named the ‘Dexer’. By removing these two heavy subsystems we freed up enough weight to make our full drivetrain out of stainless steel, greatly lowering our center of gravity.

The lowered center of gravity in combination with a quicker and simpler intake allowed our driver to drive much more aggressively. Resulting in a maximum number of game pieces of 7-8 during the regionals and a maximum of 10-11 during worlds!

Not only did we have many cool mechanical features on the robot, but our software department also did great this year. We had two very good autonomous paths on the cable duct side (so-called ‘bumpy’ side). One 3 game piece auto and one 2.5 game piece auto where we engaged as well!

Our robot also had many neat automated functions. For example, our arm wasn’t hard coded, but instead used a full motion profile with setpoints to determine its movement. Also, our spindexer was fully automated and could perfectly orientate a cone in as little as 2 seconds. Lastly our robot also auto balance and even auto align to the grid!?

TR-X Book

Every year we make an engineering notebook, this is a sort of informative booklet in which we try to fully explain our robot and how we came up with it. This year, since it is our tenth season, we decided to not just make a engineering notebook, but make a full TR-X book in which we explain many of the activities and projects we did throughout this season, both technical as well as non technical.

With the help of the engineering notebook we were able to clearly explain our 3DM (Data Driven Decision Making) strategy to many visitors at our pit and we were able to inspire many teams with our outreach projects. You can find our full TR-X notebook here: https://teamrembrandts.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Team-Rembrandts-TR-X-Notebook.pdf?

Competition

Last but definitely not least, we went to 3 competitions this year. We started out the season with the Week 1 Hueneme Port Regional. Here we became finalist, however we weren’t just finalist. We played 5 matches in total against an alliance consisting out of Citrus Circuits, High Tide and the Circuit Breakers. We tied one match, won a match, had a field fault and only just lost the last two matches. Even though we didn’t win we gave the opposing alliance a very hard and unexpected time and had lots of fun. In addition to this we also won the creativity award for our unique and inspiring spindexer design.

In week 2 we played the Ventura County Regional. Here we didn’t lose a single match and eventually ended up in the first alliance together with High tide and Team 4 Element. With our alliance we again didn’t loose a single match and became regional winner. Not only did we perform very well robot wise, we also won some amazing awards. We won the Impact award, showing all of our efforts to expand FIRST further into Europe and all our efforts as a Open Alliance team are paying off and being recognized by FIRST ! And as cherry on top, one of our team members even won the Dean’s list award!?

At Worlds we played in the Galilo division, a very stacked and unpredictable division. We ended up ranking 34th. But even though we had a very tough match up and didn’t rank as high as we hoped, we still believe we got the most out of our robot and were able to show all other teams what we were capable of! Through this we became part of the 7th alliance and managed to knock our way through the playoffs. We eventually ended up becoming 4th place with our alliance, a performance to be proud of! In addition to this, we also won the judges award, or like the judges called it: ‘The Evolution of Robotic Design Award’. An award for perfectly implementing the FIRST vision into all areas of our team, both technical as non technical and using our knowledge and expertise to design and manufacture a high level robot while keeping strategy in mind as well. All this while sharing everything through the Open Alliance along the way!

All in all, we had a great season and can’t wait to see what our future entails! Don’t worry, we won’t be sitting still and you’ll keep hearing from us. We already have enough fun off-season projects planned and hope to be able to impress everybody even more next year! Good luck to everybody and hopefully we’ll see you all again soon!