FRC 7415 News - 2023 Charged Up Season Recap

Our robot starting a match at the Las Vegas Regional

Jaguar Robotics 2023 Season Recap

During the 2023 Season, our team went through some massive changes, from team structure and leadership, to performance and strategy. With the loss of last year's senior members, the team selected new leadership all around, having new members holding each of these roles:

| Team Captains - Jack Tajkef, Lauren Scelza
| Manufacturing Leads - Harrison Bressler, Palmer Helfand
| Design Lead - Julian Lisco
| Marketing Lead - Aaron Massachi

Our team was completely reworked, from top to bottom. Over the offseason as we experimented with different designs to ensure our robot's competitiveness for the next season. We build a chassis with swerve drive for the first time, and learned so much on the way. We focused on the strengths and struggles from last year and laid out a plan to be successful for the next season.

This year, we built one of the strongest teams we have had, boasting the largest member count in team history. We welcomed in many new team members, and focused on their growth as people, as engineers, and as FIRST students, and these members contributed greatly to our robot, Seraph, during the Charged Up season.

Our Pit Team working during the Ventura County Regional

Once the season began, we used our newly gained skills to build the best robot we have built yet. We used Swerve Drive Specialties MK4i L2 modules mounted on a 30"x30" drive base. Then, we created a custom belly pan on our newly bought ShopSabre 23 CNC Router, which we used heavily during the season. This new machine contributed to our success this season. For more technical information about our robot, please visit the Team Downloads section of our website.

Now on to the competitions: we participated in the Ventura County Regional and the Las Vegas Regional in 2023. This was also our first time going out of state for a competition, and we had a great experience. Although we worked very hard, we ran into several issues during our first regional, that being Ventura. We quickly realized that our claw design was not going to work, and we needed to make some major changes in the two weeks leading up to our last competition. As a team, we contributed many hours to fixing and redesigning the robot to make sure that we had a great time in Vegas, and it paid off!

Our robot's new intake system

Additionally, during the two weeks, the programming team successfully created a autonomous code that balanced the charge station, and could also place cubes. This was a huge advancement for us, and one that we were working on for a long time.

We played very well through the first few matches, earning a top leaderboard position and holding on to it for a very long time. By the end of the qualifying matches, our robot started running into some control issues, but our pit crew worked very hard to fix these issues and learned how to wire the robot better going into next season. By the time playoff selection took place, we were so happy to be standing amongst competition leaders as the captain of the eighth alliance. This was our first time coming close to a captain spot, and we were very proud of our accomplishments. Even though we ending up getting eliminated, this competition was a major success, and every aspect of our team shined, from the scouting team, to the pit crew, to the drive team.

Overall, we had a great year, arguably the best in team history, and look forward to growing the team going into next season, and to becoming even more competitive.

We would like to thank our amazing sponsors and school who make our program successful, we wouldn't be able to do this without you!