the game
what we know at kickoff
Robots collect two scoring elements: Pollen — yellow balls, feather-light at 25 grams — and Nectar in red and blue at a different diameter. FIRST’s pre-season previews point at floor pickup: sweeping balls from lines and piles, digging them out of walls and corners, and navigating autonomously between known locations.
the plan
four bets for season three
Drawn from what won DECODE at the world level — and from what our own 10–0 robot already does well.
01 · Carry the turret forward
Our DECODE turret-tracking FSM already solves ranged aiming. This year’s turret moves to an Axon MAX servo in continuous rotation with a REV Through Bore encoder for position feedback.
02 · Full-width compliant intake
Pollen must come off the floor in lines and piles — we’re prototyping compliant rollers against both ball diameters early, and treating the size gap as a built-in mechanical sorter.
03 · Let the camera pick
A vision pipeline that spots yellow pollen clusters and drives the intake onto them autonomously — the auto-period separator this season, building on our AprilTag tracking stack.
04 · Design for the mid-season upgrade
One servo of headroom under the cap and one clear bay on the chassis, reserved for whatever the meta reveals by December. Winners assume the robot keeps evolving.
the standard to beat
bubu went 10–0. this season starts from there.
Bubu set the bar: a turret that thinks for itself and an autonomous that never wastes a tenth of a second. BioBuzz gets all of it — plus a year of lessons.
season log
the build, as it happens
2026-09-12
Kickoff — game reveal
BioBuzz animation drops · strategy whiteboard begins
DONE
FALL 2026
Prototype sprint
Intake compliance vs. both ball sizes · turret v2 bring-up · vision pickup experiments
IN PROGRESS
WINTER
First qualifiers
Schedule drops soon — follow along on Instagram and YouTube
UPCOMING