Mega Knight was our V2 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 goal for this specific robot was to be able to color sort the balls and take all the skill out of driving. We planned to do this by having a freesort indexer, double-sided intake, and a turret.

For indexing, we studied a lot into how we could make a freesort indexer be efficient. A big design we looked into was the FTC Bot Builders - Blue team, who did a similar type of indexer. However, they were not able to shoot quickly and didn't have an efficient shooter to keep the balls straight and in order.

We started designing from a similar drivebase as our V1 robot, with belted power to our outer wheels coming from centralized motors. This meant we had to design our indexer above it. So, we created tall plates for our parallel plate drivebase to place our large indexer between, and put another plate on top on the indexer to secure the turret and shooter. I redesigned the shooter to be in parallel plates as well, where our hood was two plates with a 3d printed curve in between and there was two stationary plates outside of that to mount the 2 motors and 1 servo for the shooter functions. Our indexer was designed as three slots, each containing 2 color sensors beneath it. The floor of the indexer was ramp so that 3 balls fell into each spot easily and naturally. Each slot had a long kicker powered by a servo on the roof of the indexer which would kick it up into a central whole on the top plate. The turret servo mounting was very difficult due to our need for the electronics to be within the parallel plates of the drivebase. So, we made a hole in our indexer near one of the intakes to house them and chained a large gear to the central turret. I designed the intakes to be at as low of an angle as possible, where the one set of rollers could still contact the ball all the way through. Due to sizing restricitons, I had to make a short ramp and mount the bouncing intake rollers low, but through prototyping it worked to the best efficiency we were going to get.

Our robot did not work to the caliber we wanted it to, resulting in us creating a V3 Robot: Guardian. Though we won the Inspire Award at the League Championships with this robot, the functions were sub par. Our motor placement posed a problem for our indexer placement. It needed to rest above the motors, we couldn't work around them, resulting in our intake ramp being very steep and inefficient. Our indexer was also too slow with the servos we had, so we couldn't reach an effective cycle time. Overall, our shooter and turret worked very well though the turret servo was slower than expected, and we were able to secure a 5th place robot finish. This also carried to the State Championships, where we placed 29th in robot game but won the 1st Place Inspire Award due to our design creativity and community STEM connection, qualifying us for the World Championships.