VEXU Spin Up
Retroactive post about our robots for the 2022-2023 VEX game, Spin Up
This post was written in May 2024 to reflect the robot states at the end of the Spin Up season
Background
Spin Up was very similar to disc golf. This season the team was much larger, with multiple builders, programmers, and notebookers, which was a bigger project management challenge for me as the team captain and lead builder. For VEXU, two robots needed to be built, one that can fit in a 15” bounding box and one that can fit in an 18” bounding box at the start of the match. For more information about the game, see the official game reveal.1
I was able to lead the team to its highest popularity since Tower Takeover this season through the construction of our most famous robot, Airblast. This robot took advantage of a gray area in the rules. The robots are forbidden from touching the disc golf goals, so de-scoring discs was thought to be impossible. Our team was able to discover that you can get around this restriction by simply not touching the discs. Thus, we mounted a tire seater to a drivetrain, and used a large blast of air to clear the opponent’s goal of its discs. This was the 18” robot, the 15” robot was a more traditional flywheel shooter for scoring points.
Unique Mechanism
For the flywheel robot we developed our own mecanum wheels to solve an issue with the VEX 2” mecanums, the wheels would rub against the foam due to the low clearance between the plastic hub and the rollers. My wheels solved this issue by using a bent sheet metal plate for a hub. Each of the flywheel robots had eight of these wheels on their drivetrains. The rollers were molded using two part silicone by hand. For my efforts, we won the 2023 Make it Real CAD Challenge and received this award at the 2023 VEX World Championships.2 3 4
Flywheel
A bot made mostly of 3D printed PLA, CNC router cut and bent polycarbonate panels, and carbon fiber pultruded tubes. There were two versions as the season progressed. I built two identical flywheel robots to bring to the World Championships, one acting as a backup.
Airblast
These photos were taken at the VEX World Championships by the competition organizers.
CAD Models
CAD model and render done by me
Videos
I collected most of the footage for the following video, which is our public demonstration of the robots.
I was the interviewee by the head of the Game Design Committee between finals matches in the Kay-Bailey Hutchison arena.
Results
We won the Build award at the 2023 VEX Robotics World Championships, which is a recognition for well-constructed robots. We also won the 2023 Make it Real CAD Challenge with our custom mecanum wheels. Additionally, we won the Design award at the Arizona VEXU event for Spin Up. ASU also featured us in a new article for this robot.5