Guardian was our V3 robot for the 2025-2026 Season: DECODE. The DECODE Game is summarized here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCqWA6gSCXA. This season, I was the Team Lead that organized each subteam (Design, Build, Program, Drive) to work together and satisfy our goals for the season.

This season, we were very organized and had a talented team, so we set our goal to make it to the World Championship, which we succeeded in. Our specific goal for this robot was to fix all the issues we had with our V2 robot. This included our clunky drivebase, slow indexer, and inefficient intake. We wanted to truly make a world caliber robot that could rapid fire very quickly and had a sub 5 second cycle time.

We looked into the problems we had with our robot. The first was that we didn't have a good place to store all of our drivebase motors. We thought to store them in our parallel plates, but we hadn't seen anyone ever do that efficiently due to the fact that you had to bevel gear the motors to the belts that then power the drivebase. However, we decided that this would be the solution to all our our intake and indexer issues. We also did research on a single sided intake vs. a double sided intake. After creating a cost/benefit table taking into account the labor required and the outcome, we decided upon a single sided intake to focus on making that one efficient as opposed to two.

We started by redesigning the drivebase to package our motors between the parallel plates. This required more plates on the inside in order to hold our motors perpenducular to the wheels. We were able to put them on top of each other and facing opposite ways to maximize space for the bevel gears and belts. We ended with less than an eigth of an inch between the back of one motor to the other wheel. Then, we designed our low to ground indexer. We made the indexer even shorter than before to minimize the distance the ball must travel in between the slot and the shooter. This meant we needed shorter kickers and thus different servo placement. Ultimately, we mounted the servos closer to the center feeder hole for a better arc from the slot to the feeder hole. Finally, without worrying about a double-sided indexer, I was able to design a 2 stage intake with custom rubber rollers. The ramp was an easy incline for a ball to traverse, and with the 2 stages of rollers belted together, the intake would be able to have strong traction on the ball for quick transfer into the indexer. We kept the shooter and turret completely the same besides mounting a motor to the turret for faster rotation. Building this robot was a breeze because everything was already designed out and thought over. We used better servos for our indexer (faster and stronger), and we even had room for a small tilting climb mechanism at the bottom of our robot. Finally, the electrical component was easy because we had a whole open side due to not having a second intake. So, we just put a plate on the back of the indexer, attached our control hubs, wired them up, and finished it with another plate protecting the electronics. Finally, we put all of our sponsors on that plate to finalize our World Championship Robot.

Guardian worked exellently! Though we had problems with our driving, all of the functions of the robot worked perfectly. We were able to get a very effective 12 ball sorted autonomous program which we could use to score over 300 points in a match consistently. We had a sub-5 second 3 ball cycle time which met our goal. Our indexer was also very fast, rapid firing the correct order of balls in less than half a second. Our intake was fast and reliable allowing us to get into scoring postion quickly. We were top 10 in our world's division for a long time until we had a very unfortunate string of matches where our driver under performed, but overall, the robot was fantastic!