Robotics and Machines

DARC SIDE Team

The DARC SIDE is my high school robotics team, and I was elected as a captain in my senior year for the spring of 2022 season. We compete in the First Robotics Competition (our team number is 6502) in the First North Carolina district. In the spring of 2022 season, the game was called Rapid React, and we called our robot Spinshot. We won second place alliance at the UNC Asheville and Guilford District competitions, but sadly we did not advance past District Championships. Still, our season was incredible, and I learned a ton about pneumatics and electrical engineering while building this robot. No member of our team had ever built a robot with pneumatics before, so I led a subteam where we learned the basics and successfully applied our new skills to the robot! Cooperative learning is a central part of our team culture.

In the spring of 2021, there was no FRC competition due to COVID. So instead, our DARC SIDE team had a Mini FRC competition, where we split our own team into 4 subteams to build smaller robots to compete against one another. We learned a lot while staying COVID safe.

In my first season, in the spring of 2020, we built a robot named Overthrow for the Infinite Recharge game. We took second place at the Wake County First Robotics Competition Event and our future was bright. Sadly, the Wake County event was our only competition that season, as it was cut short by COVID.

Because our building and competition season is in the spring, we use the summer for outreach. One of the outreach initiatives that I lead is a summer robotics camp for elementary school kids in our lab. We used First Lego League Robotics kits to introduce them to the skills of robotics, and we also got to show off our real FRC robot to the campers. This opportunity allowed me to improve my leadership and communication skills, as I had to find ways to make advanced robotics topics interesting and understandable to kids.

Duke TIP

I learned how to build circuits in the fall before my sophomore year of high school when I attended a Duke TIP Electrical Engineering camp for three weeks. Our main focus was learning how to use LEDs, capacitors, resistors, breadboard wires, and main other circuit components to build cool projects. The photo on the left was one of my first projects using LEDs. On the right is my final project, which was a magic piano game. The LED matrices would light up to display animated blocks falling that show which buttons the player has to press to play the right notes in the song.

Robotics Class

In the fall of sophomore year of high school, I took the Robotics I class at my school. I learned even more about circuit design, as you can see in the picture on the right. I used new components, like ultrasonic sensors and IR sensors. Like at Duke TIP, we used Arduinos as our microcontrollers in our projects, so I also got familiar with using C and C++ when coding in the Arduino IDE for my projects. The most exciting part of that class was building robots to solve real problems using my circuitry skills.

One of the most fun projects in this class was building a maze-navigating robot, shown on the right. We were given a course with many turns, ramps, and tunnels, and our robot autonomously navigated the maze using ultrasonic sensors and a gyroscope. I also had a lot of fun building laundry-folding robot for my final project, which you can see on the left. While building the Laundry Bot project was challenging, this projecy built my resiliency and expanded my idea of what a robot could be.

Personal Projects

One robotics project that I have done outside of school/camp is building a machine called the Critter Sitter. I built this machine on a remote team of 4 as a part of the General Electric Design Challenge. You can see the app I coded to pair with this machine on the programming tab of this website. The machine opens a hatch to release a specified amount of food to feed a pet. You can see my cat, Cato, about to eat the food released by the machine. My team tied for third place in the competition! I can't wait to make more personal robotics projects inspired by improving my daily routine.