Green Lemons Robotics
FTC #16468, six seasons, one team built from scratch
FTC #16468 · 2019 – 2025 · founder & technical lead
I started Green Lemons in 2019 and led it for six seasons, growing it to fourteen members. I wrote the autonomous control software: vision-based navigation and path planning.
Why this is on a quant’s website
Two reasons: the autonomous period is a control and estimation problem on a hard deadline, and OPR is a statistic.
OPR, Offensive Power Rating, is a least-squares estimate. Alliance scores are observed, individual contributions aren’t, so you solve for the per-team contribution vector that best explains the observed alliance totals across the match schedule. Finishing #1 on it among 8,000+ teams means the model attributed more scoring to this robot than to any other, over a season of matches nobody got to choose.
The autonomous stack was a real software problem. Thirty seconds, no driver input, and a robot that has to localize itself, decide, and act. Vision-based navigation meant turning camera input into a position estimate good enough to act on and robust enough not to fall apart under a different venue’s lighting. Path planning meant getting from that estimate to motion inside the control loop’s budget.
The failure modes are the ones I still care about. Sensor input that’s noisy, occasionally corrupt, and never quite what you calibrated against. A system that has to keep working when a component returns something wrong instead of acting on it confidently. And the gap between the practice field and the competition field, which behaves a lot like the gap between a backtest and live execution.
The part that wasn’t software
Six seasons, from nothing to fourteen people. Recruiting, teaching people who’d never built anything before, keeping it going through seasons that went badly, and handing it off still working. Running a team for six years is a different skill from writing its code.