SF Unity Robotics

Logistical Support: We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped our team behind the scenes. Dallas, thank you for your advice in all stages of the season, which made a shaky leadership transition a whole lot more comfortable. Thank you to team parents: Jennifer and Paul VanderMarck, Jonathan Katzman, Juggy Jaspal, and Mina Muraki for working behind the scenes to support our team. We want to show appreciation to ALL the parents for driving, organizing logistics, and volunteering and especially everyone who had the patience to supervise one of our many meetings at humanmade. Thank you to Kaya for writing grants, promoting our team on social media, and managing fundraising and continuing to coordinate our many outreach initiatives.

On the robot side, we want to congratulate our electrical team, Brody, Clara, Jake, and Noah on a phenomenal season, with only 1 major issue throughout all our competitions, outperforming all expectations. Going from wiring an everybot to wiring a complicated multi-mechanism custom-built robot is no mean feat, especially not in 2 years. Coming from last year, this year was a truly unprecedented level of reliability and quality. Having these few electrical issues this year was a huge achievement and a goal many teams aspire to.

Thanks to the hard work of Avi and Minjae, combined with our many newcomers who stepped up (Benson, David, Kyle and Lucas) along with our one returning member Sean, programming had a wonderful season this year. They managed to create an auto that (almost) never missed, and catapulted our auto ranking to top 300 in the world. Sean contributed to the vision and formed the foundation to our fantastic auto align and autonomous. After ironing out a few kinks, the groundbreaking auto alignment became a key piece in our success at comp. 

Item Theo, Kavi, and Otis stepped up in a huge way after our alumni left, leading an unexpectedly large design and mechanical teams with returning members, Zoe, Nicolas, Miles D, and Vikas, along with all our new members (deep breath) Henry, Owen, Brock, Desiree, Skylan, Nicolas, Simon, Issac, Miles S, Miles K, Max, Milo, Odysseus, Charlotte and finally Julian. Design managed to stick to our season goals and design principles, despite Minjae’s constant prodding for a 2 stage elevator and a deep climb. The final product ended up being simple, durable, effective, flexible, and not to mention very beautiful. Their timely execution allowed programming and electrical enough time for testing, and set us up for success in both of our competitions. We also want to appreciate Playing Field for quickly building field elements that allowed us to prototype very early in the season and maintain our schedule. Speaking of prototyping, a huge shout out to Clara for learning how to laser cut this season so that we could prototype in house.description

To Noah, Vikas, Zoe, and Minjae well done on an outstanding first season of driving. All of you performed well above expectations with your skills, and strategic thinking. Thank you for being patient as leadership and strategy navigated uncharted waters, with a chaotic tryout process, and some oopsies with communication. Julian did a spectacular job organizing scouting from the stands on a very last minute call. Pit crew managed to put up with the countless times drive team accidentally broke the coral intake, and was responsible for us nearly eliminating breakdowns in the middle of matches.