During the fall 2023 semester I was meeting with the ELC robotics team remotely while away on the Disney College Program contributing to the team design while also sketching out and prototyping some of my own designs, some of which were used in this or other projects. To make the project more accessible to less experience members of the robotics team, our club advisor suggested that we use a robotics kit as a platform to start on and as a group we settled on the mBot Mega which came with a variety of sensors, motors, and most importantly a stable Arduino based microcontroller with DC motor drivers built in as driving motors through a driver circuit built on a breadboard had been a source of "electrical gremlins" in past club projects.
//TODO: explain other aspects of the design
Leadership
With my experience building small autonomous robots and competing in the 2023 ASEE TYCD our club advisor nominated me to be project lead. In addition to my design and build duties as a team member I took on the role of setting and following up on progress milestones and working with team members to determine the best thing they could be doing at any moment and removed barriers to achieving their targets and personal development goals.
Result
Due to my internship at Universal Creative I was unable to commit to competing in the 2024 ASEE TYCD. In the final months of the school semester out club advisor suggested that without a viable team willing to commit to the competition, the Beaver Bot could be best used as a platform to experiment on to help prototype ideas that another team working on the same project in their capstone design lab class.
