This weekend, our VEX robotics team, 355Y, competed at the 2026 Illinois Vex Robotics V5RC High School State Championship. We placed 6th in the state and made it all the way to the quarterfinals. As the programmer for my team, I created various control structures for user control, such as solenoid toggle switches to streamline pneumatic operations. In addition, I created programs for the autonomous portion of the competition, which involves the robots moving and scoring points based on pre coded instruction, without any input from the team. To do this, I utilized non-powered tracking wheels attached to odometry rotation sensors for real-time position estimation (x, y, theta) of the robot while on the competition field, a PID (Proportional, Integral, Derivative) controller to calculate how the robot can move between two points with the least amount of error and accurately execute this path, the LemLib wrapper class for the drivetrain of the robot, which helps out with the complex PID calculations, and the PROS open source operating system for the Vex V5 Brain.
A picture of our robot
The competition field after one of our matches