Mare Crisium in Latin means, “Sea of Crisis.” Mare Crisium is a lunar mare, a dark plain, on Earth’s moon’s surface. Our team chose this name for the robot in light of this year’s challenge, Lunacy, which has to do with the moon and its one-sixth gravity. During the build season we have run into some problems as well, which drew us to the crisis part of the name.

The 2009 robot has one vertical conveyor in the back with a curved conveyor in the front. The first conveyor picks the balls up off the field and temporarily stores them in the conveyor system. The second conveyor belt pulls the balls to the top of the robot, where they are loaded into a shooter, one at a time. A shooter made of four wheels (two on each side) which grip the ball at a high speed and shoot them out. The shooter is on a rotating turret with a set shooting angle that will track opponents’ trailers according to feedback from a camera. It has a simple tank steering. Originally it was designed with a car-like steering, but due to time constraints, and weak servos, we had to resort to the simpler tank steering.