With the fall semester now underway, Dancebots has made good progress in establishing in person work again!
For those who don’t know, Dancebot as a sub group of Demobots was first created in Spring of 2019 just as the Covid-19 pandemic began. The core membership of the team was originally planning to compete in the Region 5 competition, but realized that it would not be feasible due to new safety and travel restrictions being implemented. Consequently, it was decided that work within the committee would continue, but now build it as a non-competitive outreach robot for IEEE RAS to demo at events such as Explore UT and Girl Day.
The biggest challenge facing our team during the pandemic was trying to virtually develop a robot despite not having access to any tools or normal hardware. As a result, a lot of work was put into brainstorming, concept design, and creating CAD for the future robot.
However, now that activities are considered safe enough to be in person again, we have shifted to a bigger focus on fundamentals. Testing and ensuring proper implementation is now our primary goal. Therefore, idea generation has been mostly paused as members are reintroduced to the basics that determine feasibility of certain critical functions. Much of our work recently has been focused of evaluating power sources for the robot as well as checking up on the health of old batteries that RAS has used before.
With in person activities now in full swing, Dancebots is so excited to be learning more every day! We invite anyone who is interested in our project reach out to RAS leadership to learn more or even drop by our meetings in EER 0.822 on Thursdays at 7 PM!
Author: Ian Krause