This semester, we have seen the VEX U Team in its strongest state yet without the VEX V5 rollout issues that plagued us last year. There are over twenty committed members representing the various engineering specialties offered on campus, from Mechanical and Electrical Engineering to Computer Science, most of whom have previous VEX experience.
We began our first semester together by building small robots for our Robot Day event at the Orpheum Children’s Science Museum, and this served as a fun way to engage with the community and build teamwork skills while tackling the learning curves for our new members. Since then, we have engaged in meetings which serve as full team design discussions and then break up into actual building and programming work. This has been incredibly effective for our larger team, allowing everyone’s voices to be heard and design decisions to be better premeditated. All of our work has been documented more thoroughly for our engineering notebook than ever before through a shared google drive.
Our robots for the 2019-2020 Tower Takeover Competition, for which we will be first competing in February, are coming together quite well. The larger of the two, starting within 24″ cubed, is already mostly mechanically complete, and the smaller 15″ bot drivetrain is complete. Once we get on campus, most of our time will be dedicated to testing of our driver control and autonomous routines, as 45 seconds of our 2:00 match will be fully autonomous. We hope to spend another season in Louisville for the VEX U World Finals!
Respectfully,
James Dourdourekas and Ashhal Shamsi (2019-2020 VEX Co-Captains)
