My experience with VEX Robotics

My First Experience with VEX  

I first touched a VEX robot in sixth or seventh grade. It was a small club, with 2 or 3 teams, led by the Tech Ed Teacher. I knew very little about robotics, coding, and engineering. My team and I slowly built up a simple claw bot throughout the year. After many months of hard work, we eventually got the robot moving with basic functionalities. We did not go into competitions, as our robot could barely move as it was, but we were all proud of our robot. Several years later, in my Sophomore year, I joined VEX again. I had many friends in VEX through the Academies of Loudoun, so I joined the team there. Most of my group had one or two years of experience doing VEX, so I became part of the coding team. I quickly learned how to code using C++ and the VEX library, and spent a lot of time working on the basic functionalities of the robot. When we had about a month until our competition, my friend Rishi and I began working on the autonomous code. We spent several weeks planning everything, even doing complex formulas and trigonometry to find the different angles we needed. However, we only had about a day to test our autonomous driving on the robot, and to our surprise, almost none of our calculations were correct. We went to the competition with only a simple independent and could have placed better that year. I learned that spending a lot of time theory crafting with minimal testing does not give good results and that I should put more emphasis on testing and application.

My next steps with VEX

Funnily enough, we are building VEX robots in my Engineering class at the Academies of Loudoun. The same claw bot design that took me many months to build was finished in less than 2 hours with my team, showing a large amount of progress I had made over the last year. Getting back to the club, I decided to join again this year, and we began to work on the robot over the summer. However, this year we decided to split our team in two. I was one of the only people in my group with the experience and decided to take over programming for our robot completely. However, I quickly realized that I would also have to build many robots. From my little experience last year, my teammates and I quickly built up a bare chassis for the robot. After we finished, however, we all became very busy with various extracurriculars and the start of the school year. Before we knew it, we had our first competition. We only had a basic robot with a simple intake and a flywheel, and our robot looked like a ramp on wheels. Although we did score a couple of times, our robot struggled overall, and we could have placed better. However, we got many ideas about how to improve our robot and what we should change, and as soon as the competition ended, we started to work on the robot again. We kept the robot at my house, and over the next three weeks, we worked on the robot for many hours, almost every day. We rebuilt nearly every aspect of our robot using two motors, including a new roller, a new “bouncing” intake, an indexer, and a new flywheel design.

Adjusting the height of the rollers

However, we only had access to pneumatics about two days before our second competition due to some problems that the VEX admin team had. Although the pneumatics worked well, we needed to test them more to have a consistent output. On the day of the competition, we started our first three games very well. We had a consistent autonomous roller, and as I had built most of the robot, I had the most experience driving it, so I became the driver for our team. Our team got up to 2nd place for a few games, and we were doing well. However, our inconsistent flywheel was slowly starting to hurt us in the competitions, and as we faced more challenging and complex robots, it began to show. We got eliminated in the elimination rounds but had a final placement of 13th place. We were also experimenting with a simple endgame design that used only one pneumatic, which worked decently well for our last game. However, the strings were not as long as they could have been and we had time to only attach three strings.

Our endgame in our final game

My future with VEX

With only two weeks until our final competition, I have high hopes of qualifying for the states. We plan to redo some of the intake and indexer and play around with some of the pneumatics. However, we are keeping our original design the same, and now that we have an actual field to practice on, we are planning to compete with a lot more practice. Having a field also means a much better autonomous system, which could get us a high score in the skills competition. After this year, I am very excited to join VEX again next year. I hope to learn even more robotics skills with another year of experience, and am even more excited because the Academies of Loudoun is currently planning to host a competition next year. If you are interested in the specifics of my VEX robot, I plan to do a much more technical breakdown of our robot, code, and game strategy sometime in March of this year.