FLL 2020: 10 out of 10 on how to accomplish the Bench mission with LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Pro Preview

This is a ten out of ten tutorial for one of the most complex and very interesting missions from the FIRST LEGO League 2020 competition. The mission is called the Bench mission. Why is this interesting? Because we have to accomplish three things at the same time. First, we have to drop these green boxes, specific places in the mission model. Then we have to return part of the mission model. You can see it right here, back to base. And we have to also lower the bench. Three things that should happen at the same time. Let's see how we accomplish it. Ten out of ten. Align the robot with the mission model. Move, push. Get part of the attachment back to base. Drop the four different boxes. Very clean, very easy. Sometimes it doesn't work. Why? Because the robot is not correctly aligned to the mission model. What we found is that there was a problem on the field right beneath the mission model. So we removed some of the parts there, and from then on, it was quite easy to accomplish the mission every time. Let's check it. One out of ten. Two out of ten. It takes a couple of seconds to load the attachment again, place it, start, push, take part of the bench. Drop the four boxes. Three things that are happening at the same time. What you can see is that we have lever for pushing the bench. And then we have two beams, two black beams that are pointing forward. And it's an interesting idea to take some of the bench to accomplish this part of the mission. Take some of the bench back to base.

Let's see it again.

Move, push on the bench, the bench falls. And we leave all the four boxes on specific places on the field. How do we do this? The principle is that we lock the boxes. There is a locking mechanism. You can see the building instructions for this attachment. And in the building instructions, you'll see that there is a locking mechanism right beneath the boxes. This locking mechanism, when the attachment is locked, it prevents the four boxes to drop. When we move forward and when we push on the attachment, it will unlock and it will lock in a way that all the four different boxes will fall in specific places. It's a very common mechanism in engineering, and it's very interesting. You keep something clocked and you push unlocks because of gravity. Nine out of ten. That's ten out of ten. Run.

Let's run it a couple of more times just to make sure.

This is our third or fourth try of building such an attachment. So it took us some time to figure out the correct attachment that we want. But I think that you can see it was worth it.