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 Six

Our 2004 robot, or Gus 6, was the sixth FIRST robot that was made by Gus Robotics Team 228. This robot was made for the 2004 game - FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar. The main feature of this robot was the arm, which was used to score and de-score the 2x multiplier balls in the game. In addition to scoring the multiplier, we could also herd small balls into the human player loading zones, so that they could be scored into a goal.

Our main strategy for our 2004 robot was to control and cap both our our alliances goals per match. In autonomous, we would either go out and latch onto our alliance's mobile goal. Depending on which mode autonomous was in, we would either go out to the far alliance with the robot or bring the mobile goal back to our side of the playing field. After autonomous, we would take the 2x multiplier ball off of the mobile goal, position it under the ball drop, let the ball drop fill it up, and the recap it. From there, we would go and get another 2x multiplier and to go cap our alliance's main stationary goal.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

We almost never had problems with Gus 6, except for occasionally having one of the cups on the end of the arm break. We did have on incident at BattleCry5, where our compressor broke loose and destroyed a Spike relay during one of the matches. But besides that, this robot worked, and worked well. Also worthy of noting, was that 2004 was the first year that we started to add color to our robots. Starting with our 2004 robot, every subsequent robot has always had large orange panels, orange arms, and orange everything.

Quick Stats

Drive Train

Offense

Defense

Drive Team