With the buzz from he kick off event settling down, the build team has been hard at work discussing the various possibilities of our bot design. What has been decided so far is that we are going to design our robot to stack tubes on the 2 highest spiders; we may or may not have a mechanism for lifting bots for bonus points. Last year, we have tried to make our bot be versatile at everything, which lead to some technical and logistical difficulties. This season the focus of the design will be on the offensive, which is staking tubes quickly and accurately. To do that we came up with a variety of lifting mechanisms. The most prominent at the moment is a pneumatic arm with a dexterous claw at the end. The arm simply folds up and lifts the claw which will clamp on to a tube. The claw has at least 5-degrees of freedom which it maneuver the tube onto the spider, or just drop it on the peg. Another idea is to use a conveyer belt with extendable “spines” imbedded onto the belt. The tubes will be held onto a peg and lifted to the top of the spider. While the details are being sketched out, we hope to get to prototyping these ideas as soon as possible.