Foximus Prime: Programming the Brains of a Robot

With the build season ending late Tuesday night, the team completed this season’s robot. The six weeks went by too quickly for most members, but the robot has been “bagged and tagged.” This is a technique, which is specially designed to ensure no more work can be done on the robot until the day before competition. The team will work to finish the second robot and begin training the Drive team.

The programmers continue to work on the control system of the robot. They must program the robot to recognize the different basket heights, maneuver around the playing field, and pick up basketballs. This task has been assigned to Austin Hampton, Eddie Sandor, Chandler Cathy, Mike Hrcek, and Jay Sanders. The mentor to this team is from Rasmussen College and is Mr. Justin Denton.  Mr. Denton helped with the animation video, which was submitted earlier in the season and is a “go-to” person when the programmers have issues.

Austin is a senior at Yorkville High School and plans to attend the University of Illinois and major in Software Engineering. The biggest challenge to Austin was not having a robot to test their programming on. With any luck, they can test their secondary robot to finalize codes. When asked for a quote Austin replied, “Beeeeeeeeeeeeep. Booooooooooooop.”

Eddie Sandor is a junior at Yorkville High School. He has started looking at colleges and University of Illinois and Bradley University stand out. Eddie wants to major in engineering, computers, or possibly math. Eddie’s biggest challenge is known as the “Panda Board”; it is a processer, which helps process images from the Kinect sensor.

Jay is a senior and plans to attend Northern Illinois University. He wishes to major in Computer Science. Jay helped work on the animation video most, but still attends build nights and helped the programmers now and then. His biggest challenge, as with most members, was the time constraint of build season. Jay hopes more students become involved in robotics and says, “Do or do not; there is no try.”

Chandler Cathy and Mike Hrcek were unable to give comments, however, with all the stress involved with the final days of build it was understandable. Chandler is involved with business and is a senior, while Mike is a freshmen and starting his journey through high school.

Though build season is over there is not a moment of rest. There are fundraisers to plan, codes to encrypt, and drivers to be trained. There is more to the season and more to this blog. The next thing on the Robotics’ calendar is Soup-a-Palooza fundraiser, more information on that in a later blog.