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Our school's robotics team primarily participated in VEX and VEX IQ robotics.
This means that the robots that we built tended to be relatively small, have a set of building parameters,
and were designed to do specific tasks that corresponded to the event that year. I participated in my schools
robotics team in 7th and 8th grade. In 7th grade we did VEX IQ, and in 8th grade we did VEX. For VEX IQ,
the robots are built from plastic pieces that easily snap together and the coding of the robots has the same
format as Scratch. It serves as a good precursor VEX, where the robots are built from metal pieces and the
coding is done in RobotC. I think that the events build on each other pretty well, considering the switch from
VEX IQ to VEX was fairly smooth. Please see the Photo Gallery for an example of the different types of robots we
built throughout our robotics career.
On the robotics team, I typically participated as the main programmer and one of the drivers for competitions.
For my programming role, I handled the automated portion of the competition that occured at the beginning of matches. During this time, the robots are given a set amount of time to do a pre-programmed task. Most teams have multiple programs set up for various strategies, depending on who they're working with/against, our team included.
As for my driving role, this meant that I was one of the people who drove the robot during matches. After the automated portion of the match (described above), there was a driving portion in which either one or two drivers would try to get as many points as possible. Since each year had a different game, and each match had a different partner, it was always entertaining to figure out what we were going to do and how we were going to do it.
Here is what one of our earlier VEX IQ robots looked like
This is a video from one of our competitions
This is an award we got for VEX IQ
(scroll on the image for the full picture)
Below are some pictures from Robotics Worlds 2017 (We qualified for the VEX IQ division)
This is a picture of our VEX robot
(scroll on the image for the full picture)
Here are a few pictures from competitions
This is an award we received for
winning one of the tournaments
These pictures were originally taken to be part of our design log, as one of the guidelines is to have pictures of the team working together on the robot.
This is a video from one of our competitions
Although we were very serious about competitions
and tended to be pretty competitive, we still found time
to relax and have fun. (No one was hurt in the making of these pictures)
