Together we built a Rover Robot for the University Rover Challenge by Mars Society. Only 35 teams are selected to compete each year and the University of Waterloo was one of them. I was in charge of making sure each subteam was on track for competition deliverables. This robot featured several multi-team tasks that relied on one team to finished before the other, this put a focus on communication and delegation. I had to create technical documents that explained our use of resources and time management process, these included Gantt charts.
This team was something new, we took on an impossible challenge of designing a fully autonomous FRC robot. There was no official competition for this robot, we registered for the off-season events to see how it matched against tele-operated robots. This robot was put into a similar position of a self-driving car driving in a world with human-driven cars. I was the lead mechanical designer on this team, I had to figure out the most creative and functional way to solve the complex tasks the robot had to perform.
This team only worked together for three days at the very beginning of the FRC season. The first day begins with the release of that season's rules and challenges and ends 72 hours later. The goal is to create the best robot possible within this strict timeline. This event taught me the importance of ruthlessly prioritizing and working under a firm deadline.
WATonmous is a part of the SAE AutoDrive challenge, a three-year challenge to create a fully autonomous car. The team starts with a car sponsored by GM and with each year asking for a certain set of deliverables. Along with a small team, we focused on the dynamics of the vehicle. We created a simulation that took inputs from the Sensors Team and fed the Vehicle Control Team with what the car should do next.
One of the most frustrating parts of being a drone pilot is calibrating the UAV before preparing to fly. It has to be rotated in all three axes accurately before takeoff. This LEGO model was designed to be able to receive a drone, calibrate it and transport it to a hangar ready for flight. I headed the mechanical design and ideation of this model. This project required a technical report outlining its use and future developments.
As Team Captain, I lead all aspects of our VEX Robotics team, for leading the mechanical design, to documenting each step of the process, all the way to managing the team's spending budget, guiding the drive team to victory, and brainstorming for the online media challenges. The Starstruck challenge included throwing 16" foams jacks over a 3' high wall and hanging the robot off a 4' pole at the end of the game.
This challenge required throwing 4" foam balls almost 17' across the field into a narrow net while searching the field for loose balls. At the end of the game, one robot had to pick up their alliance partner over 12" into the air and hold them until the judges had finished scoring the game. I managed all the team's needs focusing on building a spectacular robot that was able to clear the field and create an engineering notebook that documented the process.
The Skyrise challenged asked a robot to start within an 18" cube volume at the start of a match and extend to over 6 feet high stacking these pins to make a tower and fill it with cubes. This posed numerous mechanical challenges and required close connection between the software and mechanical team to make sure that everything worked autonomously. We had one of the highest scoring robots in the autonomous challenge in the entire world.