Damien Mechamonarchs

FRC or the “First Robotics Competition” is a international competition held annually to create a robot that can solve a various amount of tasks. That year, the theme was called “First Steamworks” where the tasks consisted of having a robot that can grab cogs and placing them into slots on an air ship, shooting balls into various goals, and climbing onto the airship. The competition works on a point-based system where each task holds a different value, so the competition came down to efficiently doing as much tasks as possible to get the most points before the time ends. There are two phases of the competition, an autonomous portion (robots must commit tasks without any outside help) where you can gain more points, and the human controlled potion. The competition is also a 3 v 3 event, so there were definite levels of teamwork needed for one team to win.

For that year, I was one of the main programmers working on the human controlled portion. Most of the teams used python so we also followed that. We started with basic programs like programming inputs from a controller and giving them values so that we can translate that into speed for motors and etc. I also helped out with the main construction of the robot and also created the claw used to grab the cogs. This was one of the biggest tasks in the competition and with it being a team-based thing, we were able to win by prioritizing on this one task alone. Of course we developed our robot to handle every task as well, but we ultimately utilized our most efficient part of our robot and that allowed us to win the Hawaii Regionals and gave us a way to go to the championships held in Houston, Texas. Although we did quite poorly in the championships, being winning regionals was a feat on its own, as we were 1st out of 150+ teams. With this, I learned a bit of coding through the form of python as well as a bit of leadership as I had to coordinate programming with the building team as well as helping out my other teammates with their coding as well.

You can learn more about my team “The Damien MechaMonarchs” at Home of the MechaMonarchs.