About our Robot

Each year as part of the FIRST Robotics Competition, Team 228 must build an entirely new robot from scratch. Six long weeks of designing, machining, fabricating, wiring, and programming go into the creation of our team's robots. When the robot is shipped at the end of each build season, we are hardly done. We always seek to improve our robots, to add new features, to make our drive trains faster, our arms more powerful, and our programming more extensive during the official Fix-It windows or after the competitions during the post-season.

Learn more about Gus Five

2003 was a year of firsts for both Team 228 and our robots. 2003 was the first year in a four-year reign in which we primarily used 80/20 for our robot chassis, the first that we attended a regional competition other than the UTC New England Regional, and the first Ben Piecuch came to volunteer his mechanical engineering support.

Once of the strengths of our robot in 2003 was our autonomous mode. 2003 was the first year that a true autonomous mode had been introduced into FIRST. That year, Team 228's robot was often the first robot to the stack of boxes, knocking them down onto our side of the playing field.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

As this robot was originally designed, it could have stacked up to seven boxes high during the match. However, due to the fact that Stack Attack had quickly degerated from a stacking game to a knocking boxes over/king of the hill type of game, our awesome arm design was of nu further use to the team and was largely dismantled. In it's place, a short "stub" of the arm was left to aid in the autonomous mode of knocking down the row of boxes. Eventually, "Stub" would become the nickname of our 2003 robot.

Another weakness of our 2003 robot were the robot transmissions and drive team. While our drive train design would have worked if we had used a different motor (such as the CIM motor), the drill motors would constantly "pop" our circuit breakers, causing our robot to "die" for several seconds until the auto-reset feature kicked in.

Quick Stats

Drive Train

Offense

Defense

Drive Team