FIRST Global Challenge 2019 – Team Venezuela

Maracaibo, Zulia, Venezuela

Engineering Book

Team Venezuela had two months to prepare for the FIRST Global Challenge,
including selecting our members, designing and building our robot, etc. Despite all
the challenges faced trough this journey, the team has worked tirelessly, day and
night, to complete our objective.

Our kit was sent from Hong Kong to our city, Maracaibo. Some
days later, and after a couple scales and paperwork, the kit arrived in
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, with the unfortunate situation that
it would be held back by customs. The team had to contact 4 military
authorities such as tenants, colonels and generals, together with
lawyers, to find a solution to this problem. As the days passed, the
mentors took the decision to treat the problem in person, which led to
travel three times to different cities of our country. Two weeks later,
and after lots of phone calls and long road trips, the team received the
kit and was able to start working.
The Journey began

The same day our mentors got the kit in the city of Barquisimeto, the team was
ready to put hands to the work. The mentors arrived at 9pm in Maracaibo and directly
gathered with the students to record our unboxing and build until the midnight what
would be our first prototype.
First Meetings

Since that day, the team had a meeting every morning and evening, working
with passion to build our robot. In the following weeks, we
would have built and tested many prototypes.

MicroPollutants collector

prototypes

Our team designed two different ways

of collecting the micropollutants of the
challenge, finally deciding to do a hybrid
between the two systems and materials
used.
MicroPollutant Shooter

After many failures and attempts to shoot the micropollutants in order to get
them to the third level, the team found the solution in a gearbox that would
increase the speed of the traction wheel to get the micropollutants very high. A
servo was later incorporated to control the speed of the shooting mechanism by
holding the micropollutants.

Macro-Pollutant Collector

Various mechanisms were tested to find a way to get the macro-pollutants

effectively. In the end, we decided to go for three wheels along
with a base to hold and eject the pollutants.

Macro-Pollutant Claw

As a next step, the team would have to elevate the macro pollutants. As an
attempt to do this, we built a prototype of an elevator in the back side of our robot
using the REV linear motion kit. This idea didn’t work as expected with the design of
our robot, so the team decided to go with a claw that would elevate the pollutants
instead.
Lifting system

The last part of our building process concluded with the

assembly of our lifting mechanism that will elevate the robot
at the end of the match, as we started we were using our claw
mechanism to get the robot in the air but this did not work very
well as the robot was not elevating completely, to solve this
we decided to build an elevator in a side of the robot that with
a chain connected to a extrusion would lift the robot.

Overview of our Final design and robot reveal

After three weeks of hard work the team was able to complete the building
process of the robot, here we show a detailed presentation of Ka ́i Bot, the robot that
will represent Venezuela in the 2019 FIRST Global Challenge.