Arc Flash

Overview

Arc Flash competed in the 2026 season. It is a swerve robot on REV MAXSwerve modules with Kraken X60 drive motors and NEO 550 steering, run on CTRE’s Phoenix 6 over CAN FD, built around a turret shooter for the 6 in Fuel ball. An over-the-bumper silicone roller intake drops Fuel into a spindexer hopper, a tower of wheels lifts it to the turret, and 3 in flywheels with a powered rolling hood launch it while the robot is moving. Nearly every motor runs torque-based field-oriented control to avoid brownouts in a pipeline that moves about ten balls a second. Competition photos will be added by the team.

Arc Flash is named for the static it built up on the carpet: the silicone intake rollers charged the robot enough that it discharged whenever someone touched it, in one case arcing quite a distance.

Design

• Rigid wheels for a squishy ball. Compliant wheels lost to rigid ones in shooter testing, with about half an inch to an inch of compression.
• The spindexer won the indexer bake-off. Lazy-Susan and mecanum indexers were rejected as unreliable or slow; a garbage-can prototype of the spindexer moved nine balls in one second. The shaft ring was shortened and the hub lowered so balls drop in instead of riding the rim, and a curved agitator cleared the last dead spots.
• Two encoders, one turret angle. Turret position is decoded from two absolute encoders on 17- and 19-tooth gears with a Chinese-remainder-style solver, after timing skew between the encoders defeated a simpler modulo approach.
• Chasing a reset with a barbecue igniter. At Waterloo the vision time-sync board reset 70 to 120 seconds into matches. A barbecue igniter reproduced it at a few inches, pointing to static from the silicone intake roller. A carbon-fibre brush and copper braid grounding the roller, a strong pull-up on the reset line, and shielded CAN wire fixed it. The same static gave the robot its name.
• Day-one bump testing. Driving the 2025 robot over the field bump on kickoff weekend showed it hung up on the crest, so Arc Flash’s belly pan moved above the frame rails and the bumpers were lowered to about 1.25 in.
• Calibration rig. Cameras were calibrated on a home-built pan-tilt gimbal, with a script selecting the best fifteen images to bring reprojection error under 0.1 px.

2026 Season

• University of Waterloo District Event (March 26–28): ranked 9th with a 10-7-0 record, 1st pick of Alliance 4; won the Industrial Design Award.
• Windsor Essex Great Lake Event (April 9–11): ranked 2nd with a 10-2-0 qualification record, captained Alliance 2, and went unbeaten through the playoffs to become Event Champions (15-2-0 at the event). It was the team’s second event Blue Banner and its first event win as alliance captain; in 2011 at Wisconsin the team was the 2nd pick of Alliance 1. Aiden was named a District Championship FIRST Leadership Award Semi-Finalist.
• FIRST Ontario Provincial Championship (Technology Division): ranked 5th, selected to Alliance 3, eliminated in the semifinals.
• FIRST Ontario Provincial Championship: lead mentor Terry Fisher received the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award.
• Finished 14th in Ontario district ranking with 212 points and a 35-14-0 regular season record, earning a FIRST Championship berth. Also competed at the STEMley Cup in the off-season.