For the 2023 FRC season, I led a team of 30 students through a design and manufacturing cycle to create a 120lb robot that we named "Piggy Smalls." It incorporated 5 major subsystems (the intake, elevator, arm, claw, and drivetrain) to pick up inflatable cubes and plastic traffic cones off the ground, with the intake and claw, use a fully custom holonomic "swerve" drivetrain to carry them across the field at 16 feet per second, and deposit them as much as 4 feet away from itself using a combination of its arm and elevator. 

Through this process, I learned a lot about system integration, and designing systems to work together and not get in each other's ways. Because all of the subsystems moved around such large assemblies, there were a lot of ways that they could collide with each other, and I spent a lot of time minimizing these overlaps to ensure functionality and allow increased automation.

This robot performed fairly well, taking 2nd place at one of its competitions, and making strong playoff runs at the other two, marking what was at that point the team's most successful season.

This is Webspinner, a robot that I designed in 5 days for a "cadathon" design challenge competition and won with. The challenge was to design a robot for Battery Battle, a mock FRC game, played by intaking foam "voltaic piles" (VPs) then scoring them into pockets in walls. In the last 30 seconds of a match, Battery Battle enters endgame, where you can score extra points by driving up a steep incline and staying there. I was the only robot that was designed to play the game off of two sides of the robot, and ended up winning the cadathon over about 200 other participants, many working in teams.

Webspinner's main scoring subsystem is a 2 degree of freedom arm mounted on an elevator, allowing it to pluck game pieces from either of its two deployable intakes, orient them in the best way (direction they were placed mattered for scoring), and score in any of the available locations. It also features an endgame subsystem that is actuated by a servo releasing a pair of tension springs, solving a complex problem with a simple mechanism.

While designing Webspinner, I learned a lot more about how to move quickly through design, and to set up CAD to allow for changes to be made later on, minimizing wasted time and distractions. I also gained a lot more appreciation for the value of working with a team, as while this went well for me, it was a lot of work and there are several things on this robot that I would change if I could do it again.

Before the 2023 FRC season started, my team gained a lot of new members, and we realized that we needed a much stronger training process. So, as a part of this, we designed and built an entirely new robot to take to an offseason competition: Grumpig. I led the design process of this robot, and it featured a much more complicated shooter than we had on our original 2022 robot, as well as our first use of pneumatics and our first holonomic drivetrain.

While Grumpig did not end up performing as well as we were hoping for, it worked well in practice and taught the team a lot of valuable skills. We learned more of what we were capable of, and I personally learned a lot more about how to lead a design process before the 2023 season, where we built a much more capable robot that performed significantly better.

This is another robot that I designed for a design challenge "cadathon." It was designed to play Tilt Shift, a mock FRC game designed specifically for the competition, and won it. The main gameplay of Tilt Shift is to intake PVC tetrahedrons, carry them across the field, raise them up several feet, and stack them. In the last 30 seconds, the endgame begins and a secondary goal is to get from the floor to a second platform several feet off the ground. 

For me, Tilt Lift was an exercise in choosing where to put my design effort. Its manipulators were effectively just sticks, as they didn't need to be any more complicated than that to function, allowing me to put more design effort into other areas. For example, Tilt Lift implements a custom differential swerve and elevator, both of which use 2 motors to actuate 2 degrees of freedom, but use both motors for both dofs, increasing performance at the cost of complexity.