Team 8727 and FRC robots
September 2021 - May 2024
Captained a 50-student team to its first two event wins and first World Championship; led engineering of its 125 lb robots.
tldr
- Role
- Team captain (~50 students) and mechanical lead · FIRST Robotics Team 8727 · 2021–2024
- Built
- Led 12 students building the 2023 robot, a 72-inch-reach aluminum arm on a rotating 6-wheel base; as captain, shifted build work to underclassmen
- Result
- 2023 Excellence in Engineering Award; 2024 robot >90% underclassman-built as the team won its first 2 events and reached Worlds
- Tools
- Lathe, CNC plasma cutter, 3-axis mill, CAD, fundraising
I was FIRST Robotics Competition obsessed in high school. I led my school team's mechanical subteam junior year; served as drive coach on the field; created the team's website; fundraised thousands of dollars; organized volunteers for local summer camps; and captained the team senior year. Outside of school, I read over 88,000 blog posts about FRC to become a better engineer, leader, and teammate.
Growing up in Asheville, FRC was the only exposure I had to engineering. Our team operated entirely on fundraised money (our public school provided us space to operate), and was made up of some 50 students of various backgrounds.
The team won 14 awards in three years, including the most Sustainability Awards of any FRC team.
Engineering contributions
I headed the hands-on design and construction of our 2023 robot: a 2-degree-of-freedom, 72-inch-reaching aluminum arm on a turreted base, mounted atop a 6-wheel "skid-steer" chassis. I led a team of 12 students in this process. The end assembly included a few hundred components that we machined using a lathe, CNC plasma cutter, 3-axis mill, and many hand tools. The robot made it to the state championships and won an Excellence in Engineering award.
In my senior year (2024), I was still involved with engineering, but only contributed to the early mechanism geometry of the CAD. After seeing how graduation kept forming losses of technical talent, I'd formed a new policy on prioritizing freshman and sophomore contributions to improve team engagement and skill retention after graduation. So, instead of doing technical work, I mentored new students in learning new skills and served in a project-management-adjacent role (I had to fix a lot of assembly mistakes, but that was fine).
That year, our robot was >90% underclassmen-built. Also, the team won the first two competitions in its history, back-to-back. Further, the team made it to the world championships for the first time. You can see the robot that did it in the top right corner.
