Courtesy of Manlin Zhang

A rendered photo of “Achromatic,” the 2022-23 Cuttlefish robot.

Two years ago, Class of ‘23 alumna Emily Lu sat on the floor of the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Around her, the other 14 members of FTC robotics team 6165 MSET Cuttlefish bustled with excitement. The floor was littered with empty Starbucks cups and hundreds of tools, but gleaming in the center of it all stood their robot, Achromatic — the culmination of months of hard work and dedication. 

Lu and her teammate, Class of ‘24 alumnus Sreyash Das Sarma, say their experience in FTC continues to influence the projects they do to this day in college, showing that the technical skills and connections they built in high school robotics extend far beyond the competition field.

From cereal boxes to circuit boards: FTC’s impact on Lu’s engineering journey

Lu, who now studies electrical engineering at UCLA, joined the school’s MSET robotics program as a freshman on the rookie team 7390 MSET Jellyfish. She became much more involved her sophomore year, when she led six other members to use computer-aided design (CAD) to model and assemble their robot. In her junior year, Lu was accepted onto the veteran team MSET Cuttlefish as a hardware member who worked on the electrical and mechanical components of their Worlds-qualifying robot.

 During the season, from September to April, the Cuttlefish team hosts weekday sessions in the robotics room from 3 p.m.-9 p.m. From September to November, most of these sessions are allocated for the hardware teams, while from November onwards these sessions are used by the driver and software team.

Her technical and leadership capabilities grew once she became Cuttlefish hardware lead her senior year, eventually impacting her future choice of college major. 

Throughout her four years in robotics, she gained a variety of soft skills as well as learning how to interact, communicate and collaborate with others. In addition, Cuttlefish’s weekly organizational meetings and spreadsheets, which the team uses to keep track of outreach initiatives and progress for software and hardware, later helped her successfully manage college coursework and engineering projects. 

FTC competitions also require teams to give 5-minute presentations to judges, followed by a Q&A session. To Lu, one of the most important skills she developed was public speaking, which she practiced with Cuttlefish mentor Anh-Quan Nguyen. 

“Mr. Nguyen’s grilling sessions for presentation practice for two years definitely helped with my presentation skills for interviews,” Lu said. “It gave me a lot of confidence and helped me structure my thoughts. I feel like that’s hard to develop alone.”

Beyond soft skills, robotics helped her develop various technical interests that translated into future pursuits. By the time she started at UCLA in fall 2023, Lu knew she wanted to pursue engineering. After four years of designing intakes, wiring robots and troubleshooting under competition pressure in high school, she was drawn to another robotics challenge, Micromouse, her freshman year in college. 

In Micromouse, small automatic robot “mice” compete to solve a maze. They first find a path from a starting position to the central area of the maze. The mouse needs to keep track of where it is, find walls, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the end. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will traverse that route in the shortest achievable time. 

Although Lu joined Micromouse because of her interest in robotics, which she had discovered through FTC, she soon found many technical differences between the two activities. FTC laid the foundation for her skills in basic CAD and wiring, while Micromouse challenged her with more real-world applications. Lu learned about printed circuit board (PCB) layouts, schematic designing, component selection, soldering and embedded programming. 

Despite the technical differences between the two competitions, Lu says the common thread was that they require finding innovative solutions to new problems. 

During her sophomore year on the Jellyfish, Lu showed her ingenuity in the face of challenges by using household objects as tools. When she needed a round structure for their robot but no metal parts were available, she took a round Quaker Oats cereal box and cut it apart.

In college, her passion in attempting new challenges drove her to keep working in Micromouse, despite the steep learning curve. Fortunately, she was able to reach out for help from the project leads when she encountered especially challenging situations.

“I ended up asking my leads a lot of questions,” she said. “I kept begging my leads for help and I got to learn a lot from them, building a connection outside of the project.” 

Lu believes that the foundation she built through Cuttlefish has been crucial for her evolution as an engineering student at UCLA. 

Lu’s most important piece of advice current high schoolers, especially budding engineers: “Don’t be scared to reach out and ask for help.”

How FTC impacted a student’s understanding of biomedical engineering

Even though he graduated just last June, Das Sarma, now studying biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, says his experience programming on Cuttlefish has had a major influence on his current work. Since November, Das Sarma has been researching the development of software tools such as Unity, Matlab and Simulink for the VR headset Meta Quest 2, working on sensory stimulation testing at the Humans Fusion Institute.  

During his three years as a software member on Cuttlefish, Das Sarma learned how the robot’s sensors worked together to gather information about its surroundings. In one system, he used digital sensors to detect magnetic fluctuations and provide feedback for motor control. 

 At Case Western, he said his prior knowledge in software is helpful for grasping complex concepts.

In a specialized talk he attended on prosthetics, for instance, he found it easy to grasp how magnetic sensors improve prosthetic movement in response to different leg angles. He believes his ability to easily understand highly technical lectures stems from his previous research on devices like the Hall effect sensor, which he had first applied to the Cuttlefish robot’s turret. 

Other projects he worked on for the Cuttlefish, such as proportional–integral–derivative (PID) loops — feedback-based control loops which stabilize the robot — have also carried over to his field.

Because of his interest in prosthetics, Das Sarma attended many presentations to gain more insights about their creation. He credited his work with PID loops as the reason he understood the content of multiple lecturers. 

Beyond using sensors specific to FTC, Das Sarma said the years of logical thinking he developed while doing coding have helped him most significantly in college. 

“Although the coding languages we use in college are Arduino and Matlab, which are not similar to what I used in Cuttlefish, I did have an easier time with my research since I had done programming for so long,” Das Sarma said. 

Das Sarma also refined many of his soft skills in FTC. He benefited from Cuttlefish’s structured methods of recording and organizing data. These timelines have helped Das Sarma with project management in the internship he currently works at. 

“During all three years on Cuttlefish, I had faced struggles, but I kept myself motivated to keep going,” Das Sarma said. “I still keep these memories as I go through my current internship and explore different aspects of both software and hardware for nerve stimulation devices.”

The Cuttlefish’s iterative problem-solving process, where team members constantly refined and optimized designs, taught him the value of adaptability and creative thinking. His experiences in robotics taught him that success often came from testing multiple ideas and exploring different approaches, and he soon realized that this mindset was just as crucial in his internships as it was in robotics competitions. 

Reflecting on his time in FTC and previous internships, Das Sarma said  a willingness to try new things has been a major key to success. He emphasized how crucial it was for engineers or tinkerers to make the most of any opportunity and to look into all aspects of their work. 

“Projects require ample knowledge of both sides to work. In everyday activities, we rarely see someone solely focused on hardware or solely focused on software,” he said. “In every engineering discipline, you will find that the hardware needs to communicate with the software well.”