Robotics Team

Location: Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA
Timeframe: Throughout high school

Introduction:

FIRST Robotics prepares students for STEM careers by providing hands-on engineering experience in a competitive, real-world setting where teams design, build, and deploy robots under strict time and budget constraints. Throughout high school, I actively participated in Palo Alto High School’s First Robotics team, challenging myself to work in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment. The competition challenges ranged through the years but always pushed the team to think outside of the box and look collectively to solve problems with a cost-effective yet mechanically advanced mindset.

Design & Development:

As build lead, I helped lead the hardware-side fabrication of the robot, working across milling, welding, pneumatics, electronics, and design elements. For our final year’s competition, the bot had to be able to collect a yoga ball-sized ball and shoot it over a center truss or make it into a high goal.

My responsibilities included:

• Recruited and taught new members and current team pneumatics, welding, and electronics to ensure these skills were not lost to the team
• Built the entire pneumatic system for my last year’s competition; system used to clamp and stack boxes
• Coordinated and led build information from the different branches of teams: electronics, drivetrain, design, leadership, etc.

Bot Build:

Bot had to be able to collect a yoga ball sized ball and shoot it over a center truss/ make it into a high goal.

Evaluation:

The robot successfully competed in the regional competition, with the pneumatic clamping system performing reliably under match conditions. The cross-team coordination approach I implemented improved build efficiency and reduced integration issues between subsystems. Teaching pneumatics and welding to new members ensured knowledge transfer, with 8 members gaining fabrication skills that carried forward to subsequent competition years. The cost-effective design approach kept the build under budget while meeting all mechanical requirements.

Overall the bot was especially efficient at fast accumulation and maneuverability on the bot field. The shooter mechanism required too much precision to line up for goals, and highly relied on driver skill; which taught the team an invaluable lesson for next year’s competition to improve systems designs around ease of use for driver and efficiency.

Conclusion:

This experience taught me how to lead technical projects under pressure, coordinate across multiple engineering disciplines, and balance performance requirements with budget constraints. The skills I developed in pneumatic system design and team coordination directly informed my decision to continue into Mechanical Engineering.