My maternal grandmother has been suffering from Rhemotoid Arthiritis for more than 5 years now. She has difficulties walking and simply doing anything that requries assistance from her legs. I struck luck as my friends had just won an award for their stair-climbing robot prototype. Knowing my grandmother's situation after collaboration, they reached out to me to form a team of 9 in order to possibly build a real-life solution to this problem using a grant from Lemelson MIT.
After an intense research application stage, we were selected as one among the 15 schools chosen in the entire nation for the $10000 grant. We, then, started planning and building the project in a company-like setting with assigned roles and departments, such as prgramming, me, electronics, mechanical engineering, business marketing, financing, administration etc. After a rigorous 6 month phase of building, testing, and marketing, we went to MIT to present our project. This experience of working as a team, managing pressure, time, and motivations througout was indeed very valuable and enriching.
I, as the programmer and the patent researcher, used the FRC SDK to program the robot with the provided Java API to direct the robotic implement wherever the user might want it to go based on a 3D Pro Logitech Joystick input. I programmed the robot to be able to handle linear actuators and battery intensive motors amongst other optimizations to ensure the improved functionality of the robot over other patented usecases. Here is the working prototype of A-T-A-T (All Terrain Accessibility Transport)
Reflecting upon the entire project, which spanned about a year in total, ranging from the tiresome documentation process to the exciting progress meetup with other creative individuals to receive sponsorships and travelling to MIT to showcase our invention in addition to admiring other innovative endeavors, it was simpling astounding. Furthermore, we got featured on AJC and on the LemelsonMIT pages! The one surreal thing though, would be the Governor's letter appreciating us on our national invention journey.