Involvement with FRC
For 6 years, from my first year in highschool through into University, I was involved both as a student and mentor in the FIRST Robotics Competition.
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This page outlines my last year of involvement as a student as well as the 2 years that I mentored one of the top teams in the world, team 1114.
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During these years, I designed countless mechanisms and systems in addition to debugging and perfecting these systems to achieve optimal performance.
2015, Mentoring Team 1114
2015 was my second year mentoring team 1114. My main responsibility was designing one of the main mechanisms on the robot talked about below along side one of the students. In addition, I led the development of a "moonshot" project that could have guaranteed our world championship win talked about here.
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This year, we were far and away the top team out of 4000+ teams throughout district competitions, boasting scores greater than anyone else could worldwide. Eventually however, we lost in the semi-finals of the world championships.
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The game had one main objective, collect boxes and stack them into towers up to 6 boxes high. Significant bonus points were awarded if one of a limited supply of green garbage bins
were placed on-top of the stacks. Each team of 3 robots had 3 garbage cans to themselves and 4 that they could "grab" from a neutral central area (the game mechanic involved in our "moonshot" crossbow project).
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My responsibility on the design of the robot was the design of the indexing mechanism used to lift and hold the stack of boxes as more were obtained. Designed mostly out of sheetmetal, the design uses 4 sets of chain all driven by the same motor to move a set of hooks around a "slot" shaped path. The hooks start rotating when a box is detected in the robot and lifts the box up until it contacts the rest of the stack resting on sprung loaded latches. The new box is pushed up through the latches until they catch on the bottom of that box. The design became more challenging when the whole mechanism had to be mounted at a 3 degree angle relative to the rest of the robot requiring complicated sheet metal flanges and bends. A video of the robot in action can be seen in the video above showcasing the second highest scoring match that year.
2014, Mentoring Team 1114
2014 was my first year mentoring team 1114. Being new, my roll was limited, but I still manage to have significant contribution leading to my much more significant role in the following year. At first, I didn't have a clear roll, so I began leading the students on developing various prototype mechanisms, tweaking and perfecting, which led me to be in charge of consulting on the design and perfecting the robots systems after they were designed and built. In addition, I had a significant role in the manufacturing of the robot and introduced the team to using a CNC mill to manufacture components, a process that they now use extensively.
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The main challenge of the year was to pickup and shoot large inflatable balls into slots in the back wall of the competition field. The video to the right shows the "autonomous" routine of the robot picking up and shooting pre-placed balls.
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The robot was ranked in the top 3 robots of 4000+ throughout district level competitions and we eventually went on to lose in the world championship finals against the consistently first ranked team that year.
2013, Team Capitan 1334
2013 was my senior year (grade 12) of high school. During this competition year, I was the student lead on the design of robot (unofficial) and mentored many other students that worked on the design of the robot. Although I worked on all areas of the robot design, the project that I owned was a small part of the game that 99% of teams deemed too challenging to attempt.
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Skipping the other mechanics of the year's game, the video to the right shows the completed mechanism that I designed capable of scaling a specifically shaped pyramid to the top rung and dumping red frisbees into the top. Our robot was in the top 5 robots worldwide in terms of speed and consistency for completing this objective which only ~1% of teams were even capable of. This lead to a significant robot advantage
leading to the teams first district competition win and qualification for the world championships.
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The climbing mechanism had many rule restrictions that made the task more challenging. The most important was the requirement to effectively scale the pyramid one rung at a time rather than grapple to the top and pull yourself up. The design also becomes even more challenging with how the pyramid rungs are shaped. Notice how the corners of each square rung extend outward, this made climbing up extremely challenging and was the main deterrent for most teams.
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My design featured a few different separate components, but the main two were the moving hooks/claws and the bottom wheel guide. The climber has two sets of hooks that have separate linear glides to extend up and down. Both sets of hooks are driven by the same set of two motors even though they move in opposite directions. Two chain runs extend down the length of the linear slides where one set of hooks attaches to the front of the run while the other on the back, this is what produces the opposite movement between the two sides as the chain rotates. The decision for this style of movement was due to a few advantages. By doing this, the motors were performing movement on both the forward stroke and the backward stroke, this meant that there was no dead time where we had to wait still while reaching for the next rung. Additionally, due to size restrictions, any climbing mechanism required some form of "telescoping" to allow for the folded length to be about half of the total range of motion between rungs, this accommodated for this.
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The other main design component was as talked about before, accommodating for the "knuckle" at the corner of each rung. After many different designs and prototypes, I designed a wheel that normally rolls up the pole and then a slide that lifts the wheel slightly at each knuckle allowing the wheel to fold out of the way. Then, before the slide releases the wheel back down to the pole, the wheel is sprung back into place once it gets across an innovative design that worked seamlessly.
Related Project Links
This project was part of the 2016 First Robotics Competition and was a perfect example of a "moonshot" project. The design was unlike anything any of the other 4000+ teams had seen and was superior than anything else that had been developed.
I was the Engineering Lead of the University of Waterloo's Formula Electric team (FSAE). I lead the engineering efforts of the 2018 vehicle, worked toward establishing a new team culture, and picked up on any project that needed extra hands.