CHICAGO ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAM

My love for robotics first sprouted when I joined the Engineering Design Team (EDT) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I never worked with robots prior to joining the club, but the members helped me develop the skills necessary to contribute to the projects. I gained an immense amount of experience using SolidWorks by designing chassis components and locomotion components along with analysis to verify the feasibility of the designs. After designing these components, I would fabricated them on a milling machine of which I learned how to use at EDT. For my first two years in the organization, I was part of the NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) team. We designed and built a lunar mining robot whose purpose was to mine and deposit lunar simulant within a 10 minute run. On my third year with the team, I was given the honor of being captain for the 2016-2017 competition year where I developed vital leadership and management skills. We won 6th place out of 48 nationwide schools and took 2nd place in the Caterpillar Award for Autonomy as we were one of the two schools that had a functioning autonomous robot. Being a part of this organization has exposed me to the robotics world in ways I never imagined and I met a lot of amazing people along the way.