This summer, Edina Robotics FIRST Team 1816-The Green Machine is taking part in a series of training sessions with Dunwoody College of Technology, Minneapolis, faculty to train FIRST members before the build season begins. In the first of these sessions, twelve team members — veterans and rookies alike — participated in a six-hour session lead by Dunwoody faculty member Al Jaedike, director of manufacturing programs.
During the campus tour, students were introduced to many of the industrial-arts concepts that Dunwoody teaches, including automated systems and robotics, and engineering drafting and design.– Demonstrations and hands-on activities followed in such robot-useful areas as machining, welding, computer-aided drafting, and electronics. Additional sessions scheduled for later in the summer and into the fall pre-building season will ensure that team members have further opportunities to gain more in-depth knowledge and training in these areas as well as giving additional team members the valuable experience that the sessions have proven to be.
“We’re learning [both] about how engineering occurs in the workplace and what real engineers do,” such as designing and fabricating unique parts for specific purposes, said David C., captain of Team 1816. “We also get to work hands-on with many of the tools that we’ll use to build the robot.”
Last season, members of the team took part in training sessions at Dunwoody to learn CAD (Computer Aided Drafting). Those skills were utilized in helping designing pieces of last year’s dual-ramp robot, as well as creating a rendering of a potential playing field for robots powered by hydrogen fuel cell packs.
At the same time, the programming team is beginning a series of workshops aimed at bringing the entire programming team up to speed in “C” programming skills. Programmers will meet in the team’s new meeting room at Edina High School, and will have access to the team’s previous two robots to test programming code.
Those two robots are now back in working order. In early July, captain David C. and Matt H., the team’s chassis lead, led a group of team members through “rebuild the robot” sessions, to put both robots back together. Matt H. said the goal this summer is to recreate the ball release mechanism used in the team’s 2006 rookie year robot.