The judges committee has awarded this submission

EXCELLENCE IN ROBOTIC ENGINEERING

PROJECT SUMMARY

Last year and the beginning of this year, I participated in a VEX Robotics worldwide competition. The first part of the local competition was being selected from more than 300 students to join the Robotics Laboratory Team where I applied. Once you were accepted into the laboratory, they started to guide us about all the essentials to building, programming and designing a robot. There were four competitions you could participate in and one main competition that decided who went to the VEX Robotics World Championship Competition to represent Paraguay.

WHY?

I decided to participate in this competition because I really like robotics. One day we went to a science fair and saw kids programming the robots and later I found that you can do that and decided to sign up. This experience is supposed to help you with the future where everything is going to be technological and it also makes you work with teams and opposing teams to get you to work with people better. Each year the challenge changes, so the robots evidently have to change to be able to solve the obstacles.

HOW?

At first I started off in VEX IQ, where we use plastic pieces and pins to create a robot that can overcome the tasks at hand. This year since we already had experience with building the robots and the competitions, the teachers decided that we were ready to pass to the harder lever that is called VRC where we used metal pieces and screws and bolts to connect them. During this process we had to troubleshoot, work together and write down the whole process in a scientific journal.

WHAT?

We used many different types of simple machines for the design of the robot to be able to complete the challenges. Most of the robots in the competition had a similar structure and design. Our robot could do all the challenges that it had to be able to do, but it had a unique design, we won Best Design for our category for the whole nation. Due to COVID-19, the world championship was canceled so nobody got to go.

SO WHAT?

The expected results for this competition were to learn about how robots work and to teach us how to be able to make any robot do anything you want it to do. You also had to learn how to work as a team and separate the tasks that we had to do. We even had to work with other teams to make alliances so together. For this challenge called tower takeover, we had to be able to complete the 15 second autonomous challenge where we had to program the robot to the stack the cubes without any help from human interaction and also the driver skills were you could drive the robot with a control (which you also have to program) and make the most amount of points.

WHAT'S NEXT?

This year they are starting the challenge online and hopefully I will be able to compete again. Since there is a time limit we were not able to do everything that we would have wanted to do, like for example this year another team told us we would have had a better chance of winning the excellence award if we had added mathematical equations for all the measurements in the journal.

REFERENCES/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful for being chosen to be on the robotics team and even more thankful for being placed in the team that I was placed in. We learned how to work together as a team where each one is responsible for their task.

JUDGES FEEDBACK

The value of teamwork and taking risks is evident in this project, as well as learning and growth over time. Adding some more explanation of how you will apply what you learned last year would make this useful for many of your peers to see how we can make opportunities out of our mistakes. You should be proud of the accomplishments of your team and look forward to the next round of competition!

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