FIRST Robotics- KORG

FIRST Robotics was one of my first introductions to team based engineering, and this robot culminated my 4 year involvement and leadership in the program

KORG, or the ‘Kinetically Operated Robotic “Guy”’ was the robot designed by Team 1257 for the 2020 FIRST Robotics Season, and if it needed to be said: it was named by the primary demographic working on it— sleep deprived high schoolers who had spent the last month clocking in 20 to 30 hours a week in the lab designing and fabricating it. After developing our plan, the CAD quickly went underway to develop not only intake and scoring capabilities, but indexing and storage of up to 5 game pieces at a time, foam dodgeballs, before launching them into a target to score points as quickly as possible. After completion of the CAD with a smaller group, I began leading the fabrication of the final robot at the head of the 75-strong ‘mechanical’ sub-team.

Unfortunately, the competitive season was cancelled due to COVID-19, and it wasn’t until two years later that KORG was finally tested in a tournament, where it placed third. From a design point of view KORG achieved every goal I had set with the exception of the maximum capacity of game piece storage, peaking at 4 instead of 5, in order to reduce the chance of mechanism jams and total failures. If I redesigned it I would increase the number of ‘stages’ that were responsible for indexing the individual game pieces and increase the utilization of sensors to further automate the process.