Project
The American I | FIRST Tech Challenge: Into The Deep
The American is our FTC Into the Deep robot built around a clip-first game strategy: load clips early, convert game elements on-board, then score efficiently. As founder and captain of this school team, I led major mechanical design decisions, with primary ownership of the intake system.
Engineering Portfolio
Problem
Into the Deep rewards fast, repeatable cycles, but game elements are tightly packed and easy to disturb when the intake requires perfect alignment. A slow or finicky pickup cascades into missed clips, jams, and lost scoring time.
Solution
A clip-bot architecture: clips are stored on the robot, then applied during the cycle so the robot can produce game elements without constant human-player intervention. The intake was designed to grab game elements from the inside or any side to stay tolerant to misalignment and adjacent game elements, which decreases travel time significantly.
Mechanical Highlights
- Clip-first match flow: Clips are loaded at the start and managed on-board, enabling repeated game element conversion during TeleOp with fewer resets.
- Auto-aligning intake geometry: Triangle claw can capture game elements from the interior or edges, reducing dependency on approach angle and minimizing adjacent interference.
- Intake-focused design ownership: Intake geometry and mechanics were iterated specifically to remove alignment burden from the driver and increase cycle consistency.
- Prototype-driven refinement: Early mechanisms were tested and revised on a modular frame based on real interaction with packed game elements and field constraints.
Software Highlights
- Match flow control: Clip storage and game element conversion were treated as a deterministic, repeatable driver workflow.
- Subsystem coordination: Intake, clip application, and scoring timing were tuned as one pipeline rather than isolated steps.
- Vision alignment: Cameras were used to auto-align to game elements and reduce approach time.
Image gallery
