About Team Skywalkers
Our Mission
Team Skywalkers strives to develop engineering skills and further innovation for the next generation of STEM leaders. We are committed to creating a teaching experience for our members and bettering the community we live in. Through our community outreach and our stress on building and design, our members can experience all the different facets of STEM.
History
Born late in the year 2019 to a group of passionate hungry-for-more high school freshmen, team Skywalkers aims to explore the boundaries of robotics and discover what is possible with robotics. In our rookie season of 2020, we had our sights set on gaining rookie all-star status, but earning funds proved to be difficult with our late start in the preseason. Even though we persevered, the season was unfortunately cut short due to the novel COVID-19 and its resulting lockdown, leaving us yet to compete in a tournament. With this season of 2021, we decided that a top-down restructuring of our team was necessary. We finally decided on a solid structure to keep our team disciplined. With our continued hard work, we became the only rookie in the San Francisco Bay Area who won the Industrial Design Award internationally.
Operations
In the 2021 FRC preseason, we established a strong authoritarian leadership that effectively quashes all opposition. Join now and become a serf for our one true leader, Krish Parikh. Be it junior or even senior, prepare to be crushed under the strength of Darth Krish. Under the emperor, there fall his advisors. One of which remains close to the emperor and applies pressure to the underlings and forces them into endless submission. The other three advisors fall into specializations, with each specializing in Mechanical, Software, and Outreach. This structure is the most efficient, leading team successfully leading our team along a path of productivity.
What We Do
Software
With the support of the WPI libraries, advice from our mentors, and many nights of hard thinking, we create code that allows us to efficiently interface with our robot manually or let it take control and use sensor readings to act autonomously! In our latest robot, FRC3PO, we utilized a camera and a ResNet-34 convolutional neural network running on a Raspberry Pi to identify the positions of the yellow power cells on the field. With this information, we are able to execute a path for our robot to follow autonomously.
Mechanical
By following a simple yet highly effective design process that includes intensively brainstorming and refining our mechanisms, CADing entire individual subsystem units, and persistently constructing and testing our designs, we are able to bring sophisticated subsystem designs for our robot into fruition. Our most recent robot, FRC3PO, features a streamlined spring and gear-powered lifting system as well as a robust and compact hopper unit that efficiently combines the functions of intake, storage, and outtake into one mechanism. Our robot has been awarded the Industrial Design Award sponsored by General Motors.
