Vex Robotics

This was a high school competition where I competed for four years. We designed a robot for each year with a different goal in mind. Each year, a new game would be designed for robots to compete against each other. Below details my experiences and projects that I completed over my time in program.

Spin Up (2022-2023)

This game involved shooting frisbees into goals, rolling elements, and expanding to cover the field.

In the start of the season, we tried to create a turret system to automatically aim the discs at the target regardless of the heading of the robot.

Although the mechanism was very successful, this led to the robot being too heavy. The drivetrain would overheat, and our mobility would be limited in a game that required the robot to move fast. Because of this, we transitioned to a mechanism that limited the range of motion of the turret. This allowed us to simplify the mechanism a lot and made the robot much lighter.

We had a lot of success with this robot at competition, but the strategy of the game kept evolving towards a more defensive one. This would mean we would need even more power to the drivetrain instead of just light weighting the robot. We were also starting to take closer shots instead of long range, so the turret was less practical. From this outlook, we chose to get rid of the turret and one motor on the flywheel to add two more motors to the drivetrain to be more nimble and be able to control a larger amount of the field through defense.

With a redesign to get rid of the turret, this would be the robot that we would take to the state championships. We also tuned our odometer wheels to be more rigid in order to get more accurate readings of our position on the field for autonomous programs. Shown on our drivetrain below:

Shown below is our autonomous routine during the state championships that helped us win the Excellence Award which is awarded to teams with the best documentation, coding, building, and match performance in the state.

Following this, we started to design our robot for the world championships focusing on refining the consistency of our scoring and the speed at which we could move and manipulate elements on the field. Two odometry wheels were picked instead of three as we had a center locked drive and did not need to track our horizontal displacement. The two odometry wheels can be seen in the rear of the drive shown on the right:

The intake of the robot was then built to manipulate the frisbees up to the flywheel.

A major improvement on this robot was our expansion system. Which allowed our robot to touch more tiles at the end of the game as there would be a bonus. We would use projectiles attached to strings that would spread out across the field. Shown is our working mechanism half loaded.

An expandable mechanism was also created to block other team's projectiles from expanding by moving in front of them.

All of these iterations and design choices led to our final robot that we would bring to the world championships:

At the world championship we saw a lot of success. Shown is our 15 second autonomous routine with our alliance partner which was in the top 10 of autonomous routines in the world. Our robot is on the right in the video below. We went on to place in the top 60 in the world.