The USS ProtoStar & The Olympia Robotics Federation

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2024 was the year of FRC for me, and I worked hard to build and program our robot the USS ProtoStar alongside an amazing team of peers on Team 4450. Our team did very well, winning a Blue Banner for the prestigious Impact Award at Auburn, and placing third at the PNW DCMP Regional Championships. Our robot competed at a level higher than any before, and we qualified for and attended the 2024 FIRST World Championships in Houston.

For those who don’t know, FRC is an amazing youth program in which teams are challenged with created a brand-new robot from scratch each year to compete on a roughly 25’x50’ field with two alliance partners against an opposing alliance of three robots. Each robot has 15 seconds of autonomous operation, and then the remaining 2:15 of the match is driver-controlled. Each year the game design is entirely different, and teams must adapt and build their robot to achive the year-specific objectives. In 2024, the theme was “Crescendo,” focused on art and music, and robots had to score orange rings or “Notes” into a “Speaker” or “Amplifier” to score points. It’s a whole lot more complicated then that, but that’s a basic overview! If you’d like to learn more, check out the 2024 Crescendo season reveal video.

On the team I worked as lead programmer and as a drive team member/co-driver, and worked to implement several code additions such as vision localization and gamepice tracking using PhotonVision, control systems design for our elevator and shooter, and integrating autonomous with our swerve drive. The robot competition code can be found at cole-wilson/Robot24.

Here is our robot reveal video made by our amazing media team!

…and here is a match video from the World Championships in which we (along with partners 1756 and 1701) scored the then-high score of the entire event!