FIRST Tech Challenge
Hand of Ultron 11994
During high school I was a member of FTC 11994 Hand of Ultron. Each season, we designed and built a robot for the challenge of the year.
This robotics team gave me the first serious, long-term engineering experience where I learned lots of key skills that I develop further in college:
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team engineering
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creative design
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quick learning, & skill flexibility
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CAD
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programming
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design documentation
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technical presentation
Throughout my 3 years, my robotics team has won 3 awards and was runner up in 1 major award.
At Districts in 2020 my team made it to top 12 and was chosen to play in the final. We along with our alliance won the League Championships!
We also were 2nd Place winners of the Inspire Award. The Inspire Award is the FIRST Robotics "Best of Show" kind of award celebrating a combination of sportsmanship, innovation and outreach. We won this award through careful detailing our design process in our engineering notebook.
The Motivate Award is the Outreach award which we won through running a kids booth at a fair, appearing at Library Tech days, and teaching Scout Troops about robotics.
Awards
Challenge - Rover Ruckus
My sophomore year, our robotics team split into two teams, and I became the only programmer for this team. I had only 1 semester each of pascal and java programming class under my belt at this point. I taught myself the syntax and base algorithms for the Java environment of Android Studio.
For this challenge, our robot collected yellow cubes and white balls into the central lander. In autonomous mode, the robot had to correctly find the yellow cube from the 2 white balls. My biggest challenge was figuring out how to do this with the RGB color sensor technology the team already had. I realized that yellow is made of only red and green colors while white is made of all three colors. Therefore, I could compare the blue sensor values to find the yellow block. I decided to add blue tinted flashlights to add more blue light to help the sensor readings.
The robot hanging from the lander
A video of my autonomous program in action!
Challenge - Skystone
My junior year the two robotics teams remerged due to numbers. I became more involved with the overall planning and leading the team. I had a significant role in managing the Engineering Notebook, poster making, and presentation.
I did stay a member of the programming team although this year I had other programmers helping me.
This year, the challenge was to build towers with yellow stackable blocks in a tray. For autonomous mode, the challenge was to pick the 2 blocks with pictures from a line of 6 and bring them to the tray. We determined that our robot was too slow to check which blocks had the picture so we opted to grab the two on the end because we had a 2/3 chance of grabbing one of the picture blocks.
If we started on the tray side of the field, we had to drag the tray into the taped corner zone and then also grab a block.
Poster Planning on the team whiteboard
Our robot just knocked over the block tower. Oops