Red Storm Robotics

I helped start one of VRC Maine's youngest and strongest teams.

created
  • robotics
  • c++

Here's a video of teams 4393X and 4393Z vs. 344R and 344X. At the time, I was on team 344R. 4393X was made up of the people I worked with back at MSSM.

When I returned to Scarborough, I worked with the engineering teacher to start a VRC team. I helped with searching for and applying for grants, ordering parts, and building out a workspace. I then took on a leadership role in Team 344X where I helped show my teammates how to design solutions with VEX parts, how to build efficiently, how to program the robots, and (above all) how to think critically about a challenge.

In January, the team raised enough money from grants to spin off a second team, 344R. Several other students and I built a second robot (effectively starting halfway through the competition season) and competed under that number, eventually qualifying for the state championship and the world championship (both of which were canceled due to COVID-19).

In summer 2020, I decided to give back to the VRC community by contributing code to OkapiLib, a library used by hundreds of VEX teams for advanced functions such as motion profiling, PID control, and asynchronous movement. Notably, the 2019 World Skills Champions used OkapiLib for path generation in their Programming Skills routine. The library has almost ten thousand downloads on GitHub.

My pull request added support for trigonometry, rounding, exponentiation, and other math functions to OkapiLib's units API. Code that uses this API is checked at compile-time for common units errors, eliminating most mistakes caused when a programmer enters a formula incorrectly. My addition of math functions allows users to write formulas that use more than the basic four functions (add, subtract, multiply, divide) without sacrificing this compile-time units checking.