2023 FRC Team 1678 The Citrus Circuits — FRC Friday #2

Accredited to Arnav Vajirkar, originally published in Pi & World on May 20, 2023

An all-around powerhouse who first made their mark in FRC a decade ago, FRC Team 1678, the Citrus Circuits, from Davis, California, is no stranger to success. They have the longest streak of qualifying to the famed Einstein finals in the FIRST Championship, doing so for 9 consecutive years. This world championship-winning team never fails to impress, and that continued into the 2023 season. Let’s take a closer look at the Citrus Circuits’ 2023 challenger, the Tangerine Tumbler, in this edition of FRC Friday.

Back in 2013, The Citrus Circuits went into the 2013 FIRST Championship as a relatively unknown team. They were certainly not the favorites to seed first in their division in 2013, let alone even go to Einstein. But win, they did. The Citrus Circuits took a surprise first seed in the Curie division, where they were declined by 6 different teams during alliance selections. Despite this major setback, they took a commanding division win, and consequently made their first ever Einstein Finals appearance.

A decade on from that fairytale win, The Circuits have made nine consecutive Einstein appearances, which holds the record for the most number of einstein appearances and most einstein appearances in a row. They’ve won numerous regionals throughout the past decade, and even won the FIRST Championship in 2015.

In 2023, their dominant run of form continued, and their robot design was simple yet very effective. Let us take a look at what makes this robot one of the best in the world.

INTAKE

Earlier in the year, FRC Team 118, the Robonauts, from Houston Texas, revealed their low-cost, low-resource build, called the Everybot. This featured an ingenious intake (right) which was able to pick up cones and cubes from the double substation. The Citrus Circuits used this intake as inspiration, and improved upon the concept of the triple roller, two gap intake by expanding the rollers to fit the full width of the robot (left), a design often referred to as a “Full width intake”.

This intake doubled as their scoring mechanism, where team 1678 opted to add a three stage elevator to extend their intake in order to score, as seen in the image below. The utilization of the intake as a scoring mechanism is one important aspect which makes this robot extremely quick to grab and score a game piece. It avoids the need for a complex handoff, one which could be unreliable if implemented incorrectly.

DRIVEBASE

As is the norm for many teams these days, FRC Team 1678 went with a swerve drivebase, which, as previously stated in our last FRC Friday article, allows for omnidirectional robot movement. This makes it far superior to its alternatives, mainly the mecanum and tank drives, due to their lack of ability to translate robot movement in many directions. In addition, team 1678 used Mark 4i Swerve modules placed at the corners of their robot chassis. The Mark 4i swerve modules (right) differ from the Mark 4 swerve modules (left) many teams used in 2022 as they invert the mount of the motors, allowing for them to be placed relatively lower in the chassis. This allows for more design freedom in the corners of the robot, a lower center of gravity, and more increased protection of the individual motors.

FORK

This was a rare component which few teams implemented in their robots this season. During endgame, the final 30 seconds of the match, robots had to move onto and balance on a platform referred to as the “Charge Station”. To minimize the time it took to score on the charge station, team 1678 and a handful of other teams decided to create a “fork” (left). During a match, the fork would deploy under another robot that had previously moved onto the charge station, before using the weight of that robot to lift the rest of the robot up (right). This saved nearly 15 seconds worth of time, which often translated to a 1 or 2 game piece scoring advantage.

Ultimately, FRC team 1678 created an amazing all-around scoring robot which pushed the limits of what FRC teams could accomplish in the 2023 robot game. With this continued excellence by a team with a vast amount of resources at their disposal and a lot of great talent, it is no wonder why they are setting records today in the world of FIRST, and will without doubt continue to be a formidable force in FRC for years to come.