FRC Team 299, Valkyrie Robotics, is looking to expand our mentor base. We are a community team based out of Cupertino, California.
About Valkyrie Robotics:
Despite our low team number, 299 started in the Fall of 2016 after breaking off from a local team in the area. Our goal is to become a top performing, competitive FRC team by exploring complex technologies and applying them to the FRC world in a practical, resource-efficient manner. After expansive growth at the end of the 2017 season that brought us a new shop and machinery, we have been working on offseason development projects to further push the boundaries of our knowledge and gain experience that we hope to apply in the 2018 season. Among these projects are our CNC router rebuild, our first offseason design project, and our offseason robot project, which we hope to compete with at Madtown Throwdown next weekend.
What we do:
- 2.5D design and manufacturing with a CNC router
- Additive manufacturing with composites and fiber inlays
- Materials Research
- Parametric modeling automation
- Photorealistic rendering with Keyshot
- Mechanism design with a focus on controllability
- Advanced subsystem design such as elevators, multi-bar linkages, swerve, and turrets
- Off-board path planning
- Field-relative positioning through non-linear state estimation
- Full state feedback control
- Localization based on vision processing
- Team member management through automated backend (work in progress)
How we share FIRST with our community:
Outreach is a massive part of our team’s mission, as we look to inspire more and more students to discover passions for learning, as well as enhancing the local FIRST base. To continue competing at a high level, our region needs more inspired student leaders which we aim to build up through our year-round program. We are currently working with local elementary schools and community organizations such as the Cub Scouts and Cupertino Farmer’s Market to promote competitive robotics and STEM program awareness in the Silicon Valley.
What we are looking for:
While we do have some industry professionals helping lead our team, the majority of our mentor base is comprised of college students who are FRC alumni. We are reaching out to the FRC community to find more mentors that may be interested in joining our team and adding their experience to ours to help achieve the team’s goals. We are primarily looking for mentors to help with manufacturing, graphic design, and non-robot development, but any and all backgrounds are useful.
The perks:
- As a private team, we are not bound by a school’s limitations
- We have unlimited access to our shop
- Our location provides prime access for outreach opportunities (we work in a shopping center)
- A fun, competitive team culture that strives to succeed and push the boundaries of technology in FRC
- Access to the team’s resources for personal projects
- An involved and connected network of teams and people within the FIRST community
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here, PM me, or shoot me an email at [email protected]. Also check out our website, www.valkyrierobotics.com.