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Robotics / FIRST robotics

FTC Zağanos #25577 Won

FIRST Tech Challenge team. FTC Türkiye Champions, the Control Award, and the Reach Award at the FIRST Championship in Houston.

Role
Software mentor (2025–26) · team lead (2026–27)
Period
2025–
Team
FTC #25577
Stack
Java · FTC SDK · Python · PyBullet
Impact
FTC Türkiye Champions · Reach Award in Houston

FTCScout ↗

Seven simulated shooter trajectories from different distances arc up and fall through the mouth of a raised goal basket; the highlighted shot leaves a small robot's turret with backspin and is shown at equal time steps. The physics is computed; the robot and goal are stylised.

Why

DECODE was a shooting game, and a setting that scores from one spot misses from another, so the robot needed a flywheel speed and hood angle for any distance to the goal. That is why the shooter work started from measured ball flights. This season the software is built in phases: every phase has to end with a robot that drives, and if a newer logic engine breaks, the robot can switch back to an older one by changing one line.

What I did

DECODE (2025–26), as software mentor. The robot code was written by coding agents that I direct and review. For the shooter that meant a pipeline: ball trajectories pulled from high-speed video, drag and spin coefficients fitted to them, and shot solutions exported to the robot as Java. On the robot, a solver picks flywheel speed and hood angle from the distance to the goal, and the turret fuses two encoders with a Kalman filter. The robot code also ran in a PyBullet simulator, so we could debug it before the mechanics were done.

This season (2026–27), as team lead. I designed the new robot software: a core that never touches hardware (the build enforces it), swappable decision logic, and a deterministic Python simulator that runs in lockstep with the robot code and can replay a match. Again the code is written by coding agents that I direct and review, against specs I approve.

Results

We won the FTC Türkiye Championship in December 2025 as the winning alliance captain, together with the Control Award for software. Earlier in the season we won the Innovate Award at two qualifiers. At the FIRST Championship in Houston we won the Reach Award.

Gallery

A fitted ball trajectory from the shooter model, seen from above and from the side.
A fitted ball trajectory from the shooter model, seen from above and from the side.
Flywheel RPM the shooter needs at each field position, standing still and while driving.
Flywheel RPM the shooter needs at each field position, standing still and while driving.
Monte Carlo sweep over the field: launch angle, ball speed and hit rate (chart by a teammate).
Monte Carlo sweep over the field: launch angle, ball speed and hit rate (chart by a teammate).
Locating the robot by fitting distance-sensor readings to the field walls.
Locating the robot by fitting distance-sensor readings to the field walls.
The robot loop for the BIOBUZZ season, from the 2026–27 design docs.
The robot loop for the BIOBUZZ season, from the 2026–27 design docs.
Subsystem interfaces, from the same design docs.
Subsystem interfaces, from the same design docs.

Next

At the last update of the design docs (September 2026) the new software had passed its skeleton phase and was in phase one, where the layers and path following are tested in the simulator first. The plan then adds the shooter, intake and turret, vision, and a world model one engine at a time, with a shooter that starts from a single fixed shot and moves to measured tables. The team's process notes are written in Turkish, and an English summary for Chief Delphi is planned.

Related

Timeline ribbon of FIRST robotics seasons from 2019 to 2026: a thin pale band flows into a second team's band, and in autumn 2025 a third band rises off it. Beads mark official events, tinted rings mark awards, orange dots mark the 2025 regional win and the national FTC title, two tapered columns mark the world championships in 2025 and 2026, and a large slate dot marks the award won there.

FIRST robotics Won

I co-founded FRC 7839 in high school, then after graduating we started 9029. Now I lead FTC Zağanos, FTC Türkiye Champions with the Reach Award in Houston.
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