Aragon Robotics Team

I was a member of Aragon Robotics Team FTC 4345 for 4 years, from 2022-2026. I was responsible for the majority of the design for three of their robots, in the games CENTERSTAGE, INTO THE DEEP, and DECODE.

I was also responsible for the team's switch from Fusion360 to Onshape, a CAD software with signifigantly better support for robotics teams, and in Onshape, I developed an organizational system and training documents that helped us stay on top of all of our CAD.

Something really cool I helped to do was develop an iterative system for building our robots. We built a 'quick and dirty' prototype, which would be our robot for the first competition, and would be soon replaced by our beta bot, which would build on our learnings, and then that robot would be further iterated upon. By making iteration built into our plans for the season, we were able to build much more competitive robots, and qualified for regionals both in INTO THE DEEP and DECODE. (In DECODE, we were even undefeated until regionals!)

Vertical Spindexer

I have designed and built nearly a dozen mechanisms for FTC 4345, and my absolute favorite is this vertical spindexer (meaning spinning indexer). In DECODE, we were challenged to sort the game elements during both autonomous and endgame, which seemed like it would require a complicated sorting mechanism that would slow down regular scoring.

To be able to sort game elements, it made sense to have a horizontal spindexer mechanism, which would be part of the feed system. However, feeding to the launcher would be slow, because it would require some sort of servo powered flap. To solve this, I made the spindexer vertical, and in line with the intake and launcher mechanism, and used the spindexer itself to pick up game elements from the intake and feed them into the launcher. This elimated a mechanism, and made the spindexer faster, to the point where our robot was able to shoot as fast as a robot without any sort of sorting mechanism. The spindexer also allowed for really reliable sorting, and we became the 6th most reliable sorting robot in the US (according to FTCscout).

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