Rust In Piece Robotics - 18529
Founder
Assembled and led a team of 10 diverse colleagues, strategically leveraging individual strengths to exceed personal expectations and achieve project goals, resulting in state championships and world recognition.
Lead Designer
Designed and engineered a high-performance robot, delivering flawless execution across nine competition runs, scoring all 30 game elements in under 2 minutes, consistently outperforming all other teams.
2023 FIRST Tech Challenge Illinois State Robot
Overview
Designed and built a fully custom FTC competition robot for the 2023 state tournament. The final robot was the result of many design iterations, with each version improving reliability, mechanism performance, and overall competition readiness.
This robot became one of the team’s most successful builds, ranking #1 in the state and top 20 in the world. It performed flawlessly throughout the state tournament, completing 9 out of 9 runs successfully. Notably, the team did not need to make a single repair during the entire state tournament, a rare accomplishment in competitive robotics that reflected the quality of the robot’s design, assembly, and preparation.
The robot also won the Innovate Award at the state tournament, recognizing the strength and creativity of the design. This project helped me grow as an engineer by requiring careful iteration, reliability-focused assembly, testing, leadership, and performance-driven mechanical design.
Skills Used: Robotics design, mechanical design, design iteration, team leadership, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, mechanism development, reliability-focused assembly, testing, troubleshooting, competition strategy, manufacturing, and performance optimization.
Custom Compact Drivetrain
Overview
Designed and built a custom compact drivetrain for a competitive robotics application, with the goal of creating a smaller, lighter, and more reliable drive system than a standard kit-based setup. The design focused on improving packaging, maintaining strong mobility, and leaving more usable space on the robot for scoring mechanisms and other subsystems.
This project required careful consideration of motor placement, wheel layout, structural support, serviceability, and overall robot integration. The drivetrain was designed to be durable enough for competition while remaining compact and efficient. It strengthened my understanding of how drivetrain layout affects robot performance, reliability, and the design freedom available for the rest of the machine.
Skills Used: Drivetrain design, robotics design, compact packaging, CAD modeling, mechanical design, 3D printing, assembly planning, motor integration, wheel layout, reliability-focused design, prototyping, testing, troubleshooting, and competition-based engineering.
2022 FIRST Tech Challenge Worlds Robot
Overview
Designed and built a custom FTC competition robot for the 2022 season with Team 18529, Rust in Piece. This robot became one of the team’s most important builds, earning the opportunity to compete at the FTC World Championship and becoming a Design Award finalist on the world stage.
The robot featured a highly customized mechanical layout focused on fast game-piece collection, reliable scoring, and strong match performance. One of the major design features was a dual-intake concept, which helped improve pickup consistency and gave the robot more flexibility during gameplay. This project required constant iteration, testing, and redesign as we worked to improve reliability and performance throughout the season.
Competing at Worlds gave me early experience with high-level robotics design, pressure-tested engineering, and learning from the best teams in the world. It helped shape the way I approached later robots by showing the importance of reliability, serviceability, fast iteration, and designing every mechanism around real competition demands.
Skills Used: Robotics design, mechanical design, dual-intake mechanism development, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, CAD modeling, testing, troubleshooting, competition strategy, team collaboration, manufacturing, assembly, performance optimization, and design documentation.
2021 FIRST Tech Challenge Illinois State Robot
Overview
Designed and built our team’s first FTC competition robot during the 2021 season. As a low-funded rookie team, we relied heavily on hands-on fabrication, scrap materials, and basic shop tools to create a competitive robot from limited resources.
This robot was where I first learned how to work in a machine shop, using tools such as band saws, miter saws, and other fabrication equipment to build much of the structure from scrap PVC and scrap aluminum. Despite those limitations, the robot featured one of the fastest launching systems in the world for that season, helping put Team 18529, Rust in Piece, on the map.
The robot went on to place top 10 in the state, proving that a resource-limited rookie team could still compete at a high level through strong design, fast iteration, and reliable execution.
Skills Used: Machine shop fabrication, band saw operation, miter saw operation, mechanical design, launching mechanism development, scrap-material prototyping, PVC and aluminum fabrication, testing, troubleshooting, rapid iteration, competition strategy, and resource-constrained engineering.
