The 2012/2013 VEX Robotics season has officially started in New Zealand, with our first “Sack Attack” scrimmage being held at Owairaka School in Mt Albert on Saturday the 23rd of June. The event was held in conjunction with Gifted Education Awareness Week, which meant that throughout the day there were members of the public coming in to see the robots …
AURA Workshops
Over the last three weeks, AURA has been running workshops for new university team members. The workshops introduced new members to VEX Robotics and were also an opportunity for everyone to get to know each other. The workshops featured presentations on different types of lifts, drive-trains and electronics, giving the new members some basic information to build their very own …
Shifting X-Drive
With the release of VEX Sack Attack, many teams have begun to talk about using transmissions on their drivetrains. This is probably the best game ever for a shifting drive; speed is needed due to the large field and race for the easy to access sacks (by the goals), and torque is needed for the inevitable push battle that will …
Why is X-Drive Faster?
In this article, Oliver explains why x-drives have a higher effective gear ratio than tank drives. This seems unintuitive to a lot of people, but an X-drive robot has a higher maximum speed* than a tank drive robot with the same gear ratio. To best understand this, it helps if we consider what happens when the robot drives diagonally. Figure …
World Champs Press Release
Team AURA (Auckland University Robotics Association) from the University of Auckland were the College Division runners-up at the VEX Robotics World Championship held in Anaheim, California last month. AURA sent two teams to compete at the World Champs, with AURA2 also putting in a strong performance reaching the round-of-16 during a single elimination bracket. With the winner of the best-of-3 …
A Wild Double Cheese Appears?!?
Double Cheese was one of the robots that we built for the 2012 Vex Robotics World Championships College Challenge, and played as part of the AURA2 team which placed 11th after qualifications and finished as the quarter-finalists. Double Cheese gets its name from the wedges on the front of its chassis. These allow it to drive through an isolation zone …
A Wild Dragon Appears!
Dragon was one of the robots that we built for the 2012 Vex Robotics World Championships College Challenge, and played as part of the AURA team which placed 4th after qualifications and finished as the finalists. Dragon competed in the isolation zone. Dragon is a unique robot that has a backwards six bar in order to get more height and …
A Wild Woodpecker Appears!
Woodpecker was one of the robots that we built for the 2012 Vex Robotics World Championships College Challenge, and played as part of the AURA team which placed 4th after qualifications and finished as the finalists. Woodpecker was the extension of one of our first interaction robot designs, Carwash. Carwash was designed to be an interaction robot which colour sorted …
A Wild Quetzalcoatlus Appears!
Quetzalcoatlus was one of the robots that we built for the 2012 Vex Robotics World Championships College Challenge, and played as part of the AURA2 team which placed 11th after qualifications and finished as a quarter-finalist. For one of our teams, we wanted our interaction robot to put all the objects from the interaction zone into our isolation zone. Quetzal …
World Champs Results
The Vex Robotics World Championships are over, and we’ve had a pretty hectic weekend (preceded by several months of hectic preparation work) – we will be doing a full write-up of the event later, but for now, here are the results achieved by New Zealand teams at the competition: 720P (aMax) – Semi-Finalist in the Science Division 2900A (Onehunga High …