Meeting with the Director of the Dallas College STEM Institute

By Georgia, Anuhya, Sol, Aarav, Krish, Alex, and Jai

Task: Meet with the Dallas College STEM Institute

Today, we met with Dr. Jason Treadway, Director of the Dallas College STEM Institute and a former structural engineer. We virtually presented our progress throughout the season, demoed our robot, and shared our work on Mechavator and R2V2. From him, we received valuable feedback about our robot design and game strategy.

We started by detailing the CenterStage game and highlighted the point scoring opportunities that we focused on. Starting from our work at Robot in 2 Days, we talked about how we iterated our robot up to the current version, mentioning components like scoopagon, our intake pixinerator, and the skyhooks.

Dr. Treadway is a structuralist engineer, so much of the Q&A was about our engineering and material choice. We discussed the amount of stress placed on the robot(especially when he hung on the rigging), and he gave us advice on how to lessen this issue, such as reducing the weight of the robot. We showed him our design for a future iteration of our robot, which will be made of carbon fiber in order to reduce the size (and weight) of the robot, as well as adding stability. This feedback will be especially valuable for hanging, which puts a lot of weight on our robot.

Additionally, we talked about our outreach and motivate efforts with Dr. Treadaway and showed him our summer project, R2V2, and our efforts to automate it and revitalize it. We shared the railers we made and specifically focused on our efforts to incorporate object-tracking.

Overall, it was a very informative session and we thank Dr. Treadway for his time and advice.