Robotics Season

This year marked an exciting milestone for the Groton VEX robotics program as we transitioned from a club into an official winter afternoon activity. With eleven members across two VEX teams, we designed and built two robots to compete in the VRC Push Back challenge. The objective of this season’s game was to retrieve blocks from loaders or the game field and score them in goals of varying heights. Our team developed a basket bot that focused on storage capacity and control, while the other team, who ended up earning the Judges' Award at the competition, built an S-bot optimized for efficiency and speed.

One of my favorite parts of this season occurred outside of the engineering sphere. Many of our team members don’t usually cross paths during the school day, and going into this season, I wasn’t close with them. However, the long evenings spent redesigning, troubleshooting, and debugging the robot formed friendships I had never expected before. 

Entering my second year on the team, I transitioned from previously focusing on the Engineering Notebook last year to contributing to all aspects of development. I spent a lot of time coding the robot’s teleop (remote-controlled) and auton (pre-programmed) on C++, as well as working on the intake system. Although we were unable to compete in our final competition due to an incoming snowstorm, finishing the code and watching the robot’s successful performance became the highlight of my season!

As all of us plan on returning next year, we can’t wait to build on the experience and confidence we gained this season by innovating advanced designs for the new season (releasing in May) and guiding a new group of robotics enthusiasts. :)