FIRST Tech Challenge Robot

I participated in FIRST Tech Challenge for 4 years. During middle school, I was on the Aquabots (#14853). Due to scheduling challenges as I started high school, I helped found new team, Overclocked (#22059). Here is our robot for the 2023-2024 season, “Centerstage.” Initially, most of the team worked on programming the robot. However in the summer of 2023, I taught several members of the team to use Fusion 360. This allowed my teammates to help in the design process, and helped them work with me to assemble the robot.

The Centerstage challenge required our robot to pick up small plastic hexagons (called “pixels”) and place them on an angled board at the back of the field. After a lot of group brainstorming, we decided on a robot design with a system dedicated to picking up the pixels and a separate system for placing them on the backdrop. Other members of the team worked with me to create the initial designs for each of the subsystems, but I was in charge of creating and integrating the final iterations.

When designing the robot, we made each subsystem separate so that they could be iterated upon individually. This modular design won us the Design Award at both qualifing competitions we went to.

I designed our whole robot in Fusion 360. In order to fit within the 18x18x18 inch size limit, our robot needed to fold up, something that would have been very hard to design without the CAD models.

Another special part of the robot that all the team members found useful was the addition of handles. In previous years, our robot ended up being quite heavy, and without any good places to hold it we had a few close calls. For this robot, I added wooden dowels to act as handles so that carrying the robot to the field was less prone to disaster.