Personal Narrative: My First Robotics

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My heart was pounding and my hands were sweaty. I couldn’t tell if I was nervous or excited. I watched breathlessly as my team-mates were in the field setting up the robot. Switching it on, precisely positioning it, and checking all the motor-controlling wires. Everything had to be done perfectly and properly otherwise the robot would be completely incapable when the match started. Finally, they fled the field and the buzzer rang indicating the start of the first practice match. The robot took off flawlessly, driving itself through the fifteen second autonomous This was only a practice match at UC Davis’s Sacramento Regional in the FIRST Robotics program, but that moment marked the culmination of six weeks of hard work. About a little over …show more content…

When I first started robotics, I did not fully understand what an engineer was, and I had some cloudy vision of becoming a police detective in the distant future. However, the more involved I became in the robotics program, the more interested I grew in the whole concept. Being presented with a problem and limitations, such as time constraints, budget constraints, and size and weight constraints, and then have to come up with a feasible design that fits the limitations is an amazing learning experience. However, the process did not end at coming up with a design; in fact, that was just the beginning of a very long road. After the initial design was decided on, us designers spent hours coming up with CAD (computer aided design) mockups, dimensioning every single plane and meticulously going over every centimeter of the virtual version of our robot. With a solid vision in place, construction began and as we learned more about the problem and our own limitations, we were forced to perform small alterations to our design; making it dynamic to fit the ever changing

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