My Journey of Robotics
Start of the Journey
When my elementary school math teacher dropped an unlabeled orange box on my desk, little did I know that it would change my life forever; the subject that we were learning about is called “robotics”. Over the rest of the day, I experimented with what these mechanical appendages could do with childhood wonder; out of everything that I had learnt in grade one, that class is the only thing I still remember to this day.
A decade later, robotics has still captivated me. From junior-high to senior-high school, I participated in multiple hands-on competitive robotics as well as looked at its applications and development in industries like manufacturing and aeronautics. Here’s the story about my dive into everything mechanical.
FIRST Lego League (FLL)
In FIRST Lego League ( FLL) competitions, I learned to design the robot and spent numerous nights testing and practicing to find the best design.
We made it past municipal and provincial competitions and progressed into the international tournament at Legoland, California!
After at least a hundred hours of effort, brainstorming, and hard work building the robot, I won the mechanical design award for our team.
Awards:
FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)
In FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), I gradually came to the programming side, as the lead programmer, guided the direction that the code for the robot should go in, as well as ideated about what our next steps for each person should be.
And, to ensure that I can properly guide our development, I made sure to inform myself on anything that can be potentially useful for our robot, like roadrunner, FTC dashboard, PIDF, and AprilTags. I assessed the feasibility to implement these ideas with the programming team, and either tried our best to implement them in our code, or stowed it away in the back of my mind for use in the next season.
I collaborated with the build team to make sure that our code fits their idea of what the robot should do, and also to make sure that they understand what the robot is capable of doing.