Nimbus

Link to BLUE ALLIANCE.

As vice-president, I oversaw the entire team. I helped solve specific problems within subteams while also mediating disputes between subteams. Some other duties I had were training the underclassmen to make them self-sufficient and designing the magazine (the mechanism responsible for moving the ball from the intake to the shooter) for the robot. Since I was the former CAD lead, I helped the CAD team and programming find parameters for their mechanisms. For example, I devised new methods for computing the optimal gear reduction or what motion profile should the used.

My method for finding the optimal gear reduction used a custom Java program to compute all combinations which I then aggregated the results using Excel pivot tables. This allowed me to pick a center distance (the distance between the centers of two gears) that had a good gear reduction for the task we wanted while also having many gearing options we could swap in/out.

I used Solidworks to CAD; and Java and Excel to choose choice values for parameters.

During my time as vice-president, our team grew from sixty members to 120 members. Managing a team this large required a strong chain-of-command and a plethora of tasks to keep everyone busy and coming back. I spent sixty percent of my time putting out fires and ensuring that everyone was doing well.

Below are some resources I put together while on the robotics team: