UPenn ESAP Robotics

Why I Did This

The summer before my junior year, I had the chance to attend the Engineering Summer Academy at Penn (ESAP) at the University of Pennsylvania. ESAP is an intensive program where high school students pick an engineering track and spend several weeks working at a university level. I chose the robotics track because I wanted to push beyond the competition-focused robotics I had been doing with FTC and FLL and get into the deeper engineering fundamentals — the physics, the circuit design, the low-level programming that makes robots actually work.

I had been building robots for competitions for a couple of years at that point, but most of that experience was focused on getting something functional fast. Competitions reward results, not elegance. I wanted to understand the theory behind what I was building, not just how to make it move but why certain motor configurations work better, how current flows through a circuit I designed, and what happens at the intersection of mechanical and electrical systems. ESAP seemed like the perfect place to do that.

What I Built

The capstone project for the robotics track was to build a mechanical recorder player — a robot that physically plays a recorder instrument. Not a speaker that plays recorded audio, but an actual electromechanical system that covers the correct finger holes and blows air into the mouthpiece to produce real musical notes.

This was way more complex than it sounds. A recorder requires precise finger placement over specific holes, and the air pressure has to be controlled carefully to produce clean notes rather than squeaks or silence. The mechanical system needed actuators for each finger position, and those actuators had to be fast enough and precise enough to transition between notes smoothly. The air delivery system had to maintain consistent pressure while allowing dynamic control for different notes and volumes.

I designed the mechanical finger assembly, built the electrical circuits to drive the actuators, and wrote the control software in C++ to coordinate everything. The C++ code handled the sequencing logic — reading a note sequence and translating it into timed actuator commands and air pressure adjustments. Getting the timing right was one of the hardest parts. If the fingers moved a fraction of a second too early or too late relative to the air flow, the note would either squeak or not sound at all.

The Experience

What made ESAP different from anything I had done before was the depth. In FTC, I learned to build robots that drive and pick things up. At ESAP, I was applying physics equations to calculate torque requirements, designing circuits from scratch on breadboards, and debugging timing issues in embedded C++ code — all in the same project.

The program covered mechatronics as a discipline, which is the intersection of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. I had touched all three areas individually, but ESAP was the first time I experienced them as a unified practice. Building the recorder player required all three simultaneously: mechanical design for the finger assembly, electrical engineering for the actuator circuits and sensors, and software engineering for the control logic.

The professors treated us like engineering students, not high schoolers. The pace was fast, the expectations were high, and the material was genuinely university-level. I earned an A+ in the program, which I am proud of, but more importantly I came away with a much deeper understanding of how the different engineering disciplines fit together.

Impact

ESAP fundamentally changed how I approach robotics. Before Penn, I thought of robots as mechanical things that you program to move. After Penn, I think of them as integrated systems where every design decision — mechanical, electrical, and computational — affects everything else. That shift in perspective made me a significantly better engineer.

The experience also confirmed that I want to study engineering at the university level. Getting a taste of what college-level engineering coursework feels like, and thriving in it, gave me confidence that this is the right path. The recorder player sits in my memory as one of the most satisfying things I have ever built — not because it was the most impressive, but because building it required me to grow the most.

The skills I developed at ESAP — embedded C++ programming, circuit design, mechatronic system integration — have carried directly into my FTC work and every robotics project since. When my FTC team’s robot needs a custom electrical solution or a tricky piece of control logic, I draw on what I learned during those weeks in Philadelphia.