Empower your FIRST Robotics Team!

There is no doubt that FIRST Robotics is an exciting way to gets kids involved with STEM however providing hands-on instruction for every student can be a challenge.?If you have a large FRC team, often only a handful of students get to learn how to create and program your team’s costly competition robot.?In addition, the learning curve can be very intimidating for new teams and competitors, especially those who have no robotics experience.?The Studica VMX FRC-compatible Training Bot is designed to support FIRST Robotics and to allow teams to rethink how they do training. Teams can use the Studica VMX FRC-compatible Training Bot to get everyone hands-on experience at any time.

The Studica FRC-compatible Training Bot can benefit many different groups within a team. Using an open environment allows teams to work with off-the-shelf, cutting-edge technologies. It?fills key gaps in the areas of training and off-season development for teams using C++ and Java.

Drive Team: With the included FRC Driver Station and Dashboard, new members of the team can have more time to practice. New members of your drive team can get started familiarizing themselves with the tools they will use in the competition right away. This can all be done before the competition robot is even built.

Electrical Team: Electrical students can learn key wiring concepts and skills through hands-on practice. This gives them more time to get acclimated before they start working with the competition robot.

Build Confidence: This compact and affordable bot can help students that have a passion for robotics to pursue it. For any students who might feel a bit intimidated, this bot can help them build confidence. So, while the more experienced members are preparing for competition, you can prepare next year’s team.

Mentors & Teachers: The best thing about the FRC trainer for those in charge is that it offers support. They won’t need to create custom solutions for teaching programming to FRC students and team members. The FRC trainer also comes with helpful educational material for teaching robotics.

Off-season FRC training platform:?Full WPI Library support is available which allows the development of FRC-compatible software directly on the board, using the same tools and libraries as on the official FRC RoboRIO platform.

Post-season cost-savings platform:?Using the WPI Library, last year’s robot can be kept running using the low-cost VMX-pi platform, while the more expensive FRC RoboRIO platform is removed for use in next year’s robot.

The Studica VMX FRC-compatible Training Bot Kit contains:

• ?Base Robot with 4 Wheel Mecanum Drive System
• ?4 12V Motors with Encoder
• All Electronics required for FRC Training (Battery, Integrated PDP, WiFi, and Titan Quad DC Motor Controller) The TITAN Mega Motor Controller is 12V 30A PWM-controlled brushed DC motor controller designed for World Skills Mobile Robotics Competition and the VMX based FIRST? Robotics training robot.

- Quad CAN 2.0B Based Motor Controller

- 4 x 12V DC Motor 30A MAX – 20A recommended

- Powerpole connections for secure operation

- 4 x Hardware encoder ports

- 2 limit switch ports for each motor

- Integrated fuses for system protection

- 2x Power extension ports to power other 12VDC devices. IE

- VMX

- Servo Power Module

- Built in LED Controller

• VMX Advanced Robotics Controller. This controller can be programmed in C++ and Java. Using the VMX offers a multitude of modern digital communications interfaces like the roboRIO. The Studica VMX is a reliable and intelligent robotics controller that enables tele-op and autonomous routines. Integrated using a Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB), it enables both robot control and Vision/Motion processing and together. With updated USB 3.0 support the Studica VMX supports the Intel Real sense camera allowing for hyper advanced vision algorithms. There is also complete integration with environment mapping sensors (e.g., stereo cameras & 2D or 3D LIDAR) to implement Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) (e.g., via the ROS gmapping package) Competition Co-Processor:?The VMX can be powered directly from a 12V battery and is legal for First Robotics competition use as a vision/motion co-processor.

- Switched-mode Power supply for external devices, including under-voltage management and over-current/short-circuit protection

- 30 Digital IOs and 4 Analog Inputs including circuit protection against over-voltage, and locking connectors for many functions

- Digital Communication Interfaces including CAN, SPI, I2C and UART

- navX-technology 9-axis IMU enabling Motion processing features including?Field-Oriented Drive,?Auto-balance,?Auto-rotate to angle,?Collision Detection?and more

- Easily connect to sensors:?Breakout boards are available for easily connecting to the QWIIC Connect System?family of I2C sensors.

- Vision processing with multiple cameras via Raspberry Pi-based OpenCV libraries and USB or Raspberry Pi Camera interfaces

• With a Linux-based operating system, users can directly access most modern devices (things like Intel RealSense tracking, LIDAR, and depth cameras).
• Bundled with Curriculum and Training Material.

The Studica VMX FRC-compatible Training Bot leverages five recent key technology developments:

• Highly integrated, inexpensive, WiFi-enabled, multi-core Linux computers with lots of USB IO for expansion (e.g., Raspberry Pi 4B)
• 32-bit ARM Microcontrollers incorporating sophisticated I/O and digital communications engines
• ?Low-cost MEMs Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs)
• Powerful software providing rich libraries and tools for developing robot software in C++, Java (e.g., the WPI Library)
• The CAN bus for high-speed, real-time communication between devices

VMX Technology enables:

• Far richer development environments and tools
• Because VMX is much more than a robot controller – it is a powerful, Linux-based desktop computing platform with network/monitor/keyboard/mouse support.
• Very powerful software features
• ?State-of-the-art software development GUIs (e.g., VS Code) libraries and tools (drive-train kinematics, path-planning, vision processing, autonomous navigation, performance data acquisition/playback)
• Access to cutting-edge sensors
• VMX’s multitude of modern digital communications interfaces and Linux-based operating system allow users to directly access most modern devices (e.g., Intel RealSense tracking and depth cameras and LIDAR)?

The Studica VMX FRC-compatible Training Bot provides a simple testbed for programming practice. Students can also utilize the bot to work on autonomous or drivetrain development. It is a small, sturdy, cost effective robot using FRC software for learning programming and researching concepts and ideas.

You can find further information on the Studica Robotics line here,?https://www.studica.com/studica-robotics-2 and the Studica VMX FRC-compatible Training Bot here, https://www.studica.com/vmfrc-compatible-training-bot