Our second FTC #TeamREV Spotlight for #NationalRoboticsWeek is Team #17969, MECH!

Tell us a little bit about your team’s background.

We started our team in 2020 and built our first robot for the ULTIMATE GOAL game. Since then, we’ve worked hard to be incorporated as an academic competition at JK Mullen High School in Denver, Colorado. 

We have a fun robot face team logo designed by one of our members. 

We’ve named our Robot “Swifty” as a nod to 14-Grammy Award winner Taylor Swift, and this season’s art theme.

What are a few recent achievements your team is proud of?

We are most proud of our outreach activities. As the season ends, we begin professional and community outreach. We work with team family contacts to arrange meeting and tours of local STEM businesses and colleges. We almost never turn down an opportunity to demonstrate our robot at a community, school, or FIRST event. 

This year, we worked with our school administration to host our first FTC qualifier! This was super cool because it greatly increased awareness of competitive robotics at our school. 

Our robot is pretty amazing too. This is the most advanced robot we’ve ever made. We have an active intake that uses two stages of intake wheels, reverse rotating wheels, and two conveyor belts. We place pixels on the backdrop using a two-stage lift with a virtual four-bar and 4 degrees of freedom grabber. We also have a lead screw robot lifter and drone launcher mounted to a rotator. That allows us to vary drone launch angles and hook our robot to the rigging. 

Finally, we’ve been able to implement our odometery and pure pursuit path following algorithms that we’ve been developing the past two years. We presented on the topic of odometry at the season kickoff event in Colorado.

Every member of our team won a $30,000 per year scholarship to Regis University in Denver, Colorado for winning the Inspire Award at our first qualifying tournament. We were also featured on the front page of our school newsletter. 

What has your team been working on recently?

MECH qualified for FIRST Championship in Houston for the first time!! MECH was the Winning Alliance Captain and won 2nd place Inspire at the Colorado State Championship.

What is your favorite part about being in the #TeamREV program?

We enjoy sharing our journey and spending time reflecting and appreciating what amazing work we’ve done. We also sincerely appreciate funding assistance. Competing in FTC is expensive and REV enables us to have a better season.

We'll see you at FIRST Championship, MECH! Follow the team on Instagram.