stormi

Robot name origin: the “rise and shine” video from the Kardashians that went viral

With two years under my belt and an experience at Worlds, I now wanted to become an all-rounder. I wanted to win competitions and Skills challenges.

I was excited. Not just because I saw the challenge launch live at Worlds, (video here), but because it reminded me a lot of my first season, where the objective was to stack cones. Except now it was with cubes. Hmmm… similar problem so similar solution… right?

NOPE!

I wanted to started fresh, and look at this stacking problem a different way. Nothing about my new bot, Stormi, resembled my first one.

Cool subsystems and specs:

• Moving intake mechanism to lift cubes into towers (gotta get point multipliers)
• Super torqued tray tipper (have to be able to move long tray with cubes on it)
• Very condensed powertrain to enable better approach to the scoring zone, which had a physical barrier in front of it
  • Tradeoff was stability (I learned the hard way during a competition’s semifinal match that Stormi was extremely easy to tip over).
  • Made up for this by installing an extension on the back of the powertrain that had a set of tiny unpowered wheels.
• Tri-fold snap-open tray to hold cubes (powered by about 70 rubberbands)

A goal for this year was to start dedicating much more time to the Skills challenge. I wanted to see if this could become a stronger forte than just winning match. With many late nights at the lab, tons of strategy planning, hours of driving practice, hundreds of failures, and even destroying batteries from overuse, I finally nailed the Driver’s Skills Challenge and ranked 9th statewide.

I also developed an Autonomous Skills program:

Pursuing Skills doggedly turned out to be a great idea, since it also helped our competition performance. We won a competition, multiple Skills challenges, and awards.

I felt great. I was pumped. I was so ready to get to Worlds and do miles better than last year. I believed that I could even win the State Championship. The week before states, my team and I met for 4-5 hours everyday after school, revamping our build to have it cleaner, lighter, and more robust. We fine-tuned our odometry to be much more precise. “Bring it on,” we said.

The catch?

This was the week of March 13, 2020… the fateful week where many schools (including mine) and offices announced shutting down due to the novel coronavirus. The State Championship was cancelled. I held on to hope that maybe, possibly, somehow Worlds could still happen in May? Welp. It did not.

I was definitely bummed that I couldn’t showcase Stormi at the next levels of competition, but I for sure felt very proud of what I had achieved. I not only won some comps, but developed more confidence in my design skills, and a much stronger knack for Skills that would play a big part next year…

(In the meantime, my team and I made cool pyramids lol)