About the Team

We are Team 5567A Stemosaurus (Luca, Neko, Simon, Knox, and Kaiya) from Menlo Park, CA. We are in our second season of VEX Robotics.

About this Season

For this year's game, Mix & Match, we focused on creating a versatile conveyer robot capable of scoring points through complex pin stacking and beam manipulation. This includes the following: 1) Hybrid Intake & Pin Flipper: To handle pins in any orientation, we developed a "pin flipper" or "clothesliner." This pneumatic-powered mechanism allows our robot to intake pins right-side up or flip them upside down for stacking in beams. We made 12 prototypes before getting it to work reliably. 2) Beam Hold: We suck the beam into our robot, then drop the upside down pins through our "pin stacker" into the outer holes. We programmed a macro subroutine to move the beam efficiently in and out of our robot. 3) Beam Clamp: We grab the beam from the narrow end using two 2X Pneumatic Cylinders. We have never seen another Mix & Match robot build a cactus the way we built a cactus! It's been a really challenging but fun season for us. We won Excellence Awards at tournaments in East Palo Alto and Davis. We also received Design Awards at the Signature Kalahari Classic in Ohio and the Northern California Regionals in Sacramento. We successfully qualified for the VEX IQ World Championship in St. Louis, MO, and we are super excited to be invited!