Overview
I have spent 3 years on the Queen’s VEXU Robotics team, which competes in the university level of the VEX Robotics Competition, which is the largest robotics competition in the world. Throughout my time on the team I acted in various programming and leadership roles, acting as the captain of the entire technical team (100+ members) during the 2024-2025 season.
2023-2024 Season
During the 2023-2024 season I acted as a software member on several subteams. The primary project I worked on was the robot localization system. I acted as one of the primary members developing a LiDAR based localization system using a custom interface board. During this year I learned a lot about algorithms in robotics, and we were able to successfully develop and use a UKF-based localization system at the world championship. We used minimal external libraries for this, and I implemented most the SR-UKF implementation, the state transfer function, and measurement functions myself.
We developed extensive tools for data collection, code profiling, and analysis to improve the performance of the algorithm. One major tool was a system which allowed us to log all data collected by the LiDAR and review the performance of the system during matches and tune it afterwards. Attached is an interview from the following season where I showcase the system:
2024-2025 Season
For the 2024-2025 season I was elected as the head of the technical team, acting as co-captain. I also still held a lower level role as the head of the GNC subteam. I managed the integration of the software, electrical, and mechanical subteams, acting as a project manager and doing some work for each of the teams. Our GNC systems had now been refined for multiple years, and we found great success using them in competition. In November 2024 we set the unofficial world skills record (The highest score in a time-trial gamemode where you score as many points as possible using your 2 robots). We were remained ranked top 5 globally for the entire duration of the 2024-2025 season:
Throughout the season, the team travelled to 7 competitions - I attended 6 of these acting as a programmer and drive team member. We were able to win eleven awards while attending these competitions, including multiple at the world championship level. We ended the season with a qualification record of 32-11.
2025 VEXAI World Championship
We also participated in the VEXAI robotics competition, which is a spinoff of VEXU where robots operate autonomously for the entire 2 minute match. As preparation for this competition, I helped to write an object localization system which used cameras for object detection, and an EKF for object localization. This was integrated with an A* pathfinding system with the aim of picking up rings and scoring autonomously. We achieved an 8-2 qualification record, and placed first in skills - achieving the World Skills Champion award and the Think award (awarded for “impressive and effective autonomous programming”).
Present
I no longer actively program on the team, but I act as a software advisor and help current members on the team fairly often.