FIRST Robotics Competition

In my senior year of high school, I was responsible for the design of the robot, including the drive system and the object manipulation system. This included a mechanism for laterally aligning game objects while placing them and the mechanisms for picking up and placing game objects.

The designs I made heavily used 3D printed parts, since that was one of the best methods of manufacturing we had access to. 3D printing allowed us to rapidly build, test, and iterate on our designs, allowing for refinement far greater than we had ever been able to accomplish in previous years.

2018 was a bit of a breakthrough year for my team. With my encouragement, we began to use CAD for designing the robot, really starting to engineer a robot instead of just slapping together something that we thought would work. 

This new attention to detail in design along with a decision to try and keep our robot as simple as we could led to our most reliable robot up to that point, having very few significant issues during our matches.