FRC Robotics!

Last weekend, I was at the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) at Stan Sheriff Center. Our team, 2438, did pretty well, and ended up in the finals, and although we didn't win, we got eliminated after losing to the winning alliance.
Here is our robot.Credit to Lauren Faris who was doing field reset stuffs, so she was close enough to take decent pictures.
Pretty! Shiny! (This is sounding strangely like Vicky, so I'll stop now...)

Obviously a lot of physics (and fun) is involved in building a big metal hundred pound robot. The part that I'll focus on today (so that I can stretch out robotics over several different blogs) is the balance of the robot. It's really important that the center of mass be as close to the center of the robot as possible, so that our robot is stable and will not flip over. As proof of the skillfulness of this, our robot was never flipped in a match, as many others were. While building and designing, we occasionally checked to see if there was more weight (mg!) in the front or back of the robot. When we tried to figure out where the battery should be placed, we balanced the robot on something to see if it wanted to tip further forward or back. Eventually we decided to mount the battery straps in the back to balance out the weight of the kicker in the front. Our robot was also low to the ground, and this meant that the center of mass was lower and so the robot wanted to stay in static equilibrium.