About the Team

Established in 2018, Spark Robotics is a Harker middle school VEX competitive robotics club with a goal to spread understanding and appreciation for STEM in our community and among its members. The Spark Robotics team has built 3 competition robots and competed in over 6 competition events and were quarter finalists at the Dublin VEX robotics in 2019 Turning point challenge and finalists in the VEX Stockton robotics in the 2020 Tower Takeover challenge. This year because of the pandemic the team decided to continue to build a competitive robot online for VEX Change Up challenge and participate in virtual online competitions. Our activities are focused on using distance, inertial and optical sensors for creating an autonomous robot that can navigate the competition field and objects. We are currently exploring how this robot can be used to deliver social distancing compliant services.

About this Season

During COVID our team was selected to present at Robotics & Automation Science Symposium - Harker Science Symposium where we demonstrated the use of our robot through a remote zoom connection and informed the audience of the VEX robot community and informed an international audience on how we collaborated and built a robot for the VEX competition but also presented how the robot could be used in the context of helping in maintaining a community that is needs to maintain social distancing in its activities. https://www.harker.org/about/events/research-symposium#bookmark-intro