Blog

We, Dauntless, are a First Lego League robotics team. We have cleared the qualifiers with the Champions Award, and are now advancing to state.

The competition is split into 4 stages. Qualifiers, state, nationals, and finally internationals.

During the time before the competition, we received help from many sources, which may have been one of the traits that stood out. We conducted interviews with Dr. Laurel Schaider to find subjects to focus on, and Dr. Yujie Men to learn about PFAS (per- and poly- fluoralkyl substances), which was the issue we decided to study. We also paid a visit to the UCSD (Urbana Champaign Sanitary District) to further understand the wastewater treatment cycle, and come up with a solution.

Our robot, Phoenix, has a special tool, called the k-knife, which can perform a variety of tasks. It is attached to a motor, so that the tool can push, place, press, and flick at high speeds. This tool was created by Kabir Thirodira, an honorary member, who isn't old enough to participate in the competition.

In the week of 1/1, we...

  • Added another arm that uses a gear system in the back of the robot.
  • Programmed and fine-tuned a couple tasks.

In the week of 1/11/2018, we worked on...

  • Assigning our roles for the Robot design project.
  • We presented our "prototype" presentation (and filmed it).
  • We talked about how the presentation should go.
  • We worked on assigning roles for our Core Values Presentation.
  • We made a new core values presentation.
  • In our presentation we added many pictures following the core values.
  • We sourced our references for our project.
  • We fixed mistakes and filled in gaps in our PFAS presentation.

In the week of 1/8, we...

  • Practiced all of our presentations
  • Programmed and almost finished some tasks including the flow
  • Finished our presentation boards

In the week of 1/25, we...

  • Made a short version of the presentation
  • Came to Robotics with 1-2 other people at a time
  • Practiced the Core Values presentation without one of our team members
  • Programmed other tasks such as toilet