Role:
Coach and Mentor
Quick Facts:
∎ Coached a team to win the Think Award, a prestigious honor in programming and autonomous robotics at the VEX AI World Championship in Houston.
∎ Out of 20,000 global VEX teams, less than 1% participate in the advanced AI division, with only 20 qualifying for the World Championship.
∎ Developed two fully autonomous robots with advanced path-planning and multi-object detection, setting a high bar for precision and performance.
∎ Demonstrated excellence in autonomous robotics, navigating obstacles and executing complex tasks on the world stage.
Mentoring this team through the 2024 VEX AI World Championship was a deeply fulfilling and intense experience. For weeks leading up to the event, we worked tirelessly, navigating the challenges of a rapidly evolving platform with numerous moving parts. Our objective was ambitious: to build two fully autonomous, intelligent robots capable of exceptional precision, agility, and coordination. Returning as a mentor after previously winning the Excellence Award in the 2021 pilot VEX AI program, I poured my experience into guiding these high school students, pushing the limits of what we could achieve and seeing the team excel under intense conditions.
Our performance at the World Championship showcased some of the most advanced capabilities in autonomous robotics. The two robots we developed—a 24-inch primary robot and a 15-inch companion robot—operated with precision and sophistication. With a custom path-planning algorithm for obstacle navigation, a multi-object detection model for scoring, and polygon filtering for strategic isolation tasks, our robots performed impressively, scoring and defending autonomously. Winning the Think Award was a powerful acknowledgment of our technical achievements, solidifying our team as world-class in this niche field and reinforcing the value of dedicated mentorship and innovation in robotics.
