Robotics team finishes seventh at district, moves on to regionals Feb. 14

Although the competition is not exactly the battle between Robocop and Optimus Prime, the robotics team ranked seventh out of 32 teams in the qualifying rounds of the FIRST Tech Challenge while competing at the University of Texas at Dallas Jan. 17. They were chosen as an ally by Parish Episcopal High School, one of the top four teams, to compete in the semifinals. After a winner-take-all third match the schools advanced to regionals scheduled for Feb. 14.

The FIRST Tech Challenge, the robotics competition, is based on a set of objectives that have a set point value assigned to each objective. The requirements for the competition include the robot fitting in an 18 inch by 18 inch box and the teams must use parts out of a Tetrix kit.

“One of the improvements that we did was raise the height of our arm,” president and notebook head Emily Esch said. “Before we could only reach the small thirty centimeter goal, but now we can hit the 60 which is more points. You can get two points per centimeter when you hit the sixty centimeter goal.

The team must document any supplies used outside of a Tetrix kit in their journal, where they keep information about their robot. This year the team chose to program their robot to pick up a ball, drive over to a clear plastic tube and drop the ball in. For the upcoming regionals competition the robotics team is improving their robot to increase their points.

“Another thing we’re improving upon is we’re trying to get our program to work with an ultrasonic sensor so it stops a certain distance away from the goal and then immediately drops the ball in the tube,” Esch said. “Other than that we were really happy with our performance so we really didn’t improve too much on our robot. Overall it did a lot better than we expected it to.”

The FIRST Tech Challenge pits two robots versus two robots in a match. The competition runs like a final four type bracket, the top four teams at the end of qualifying matches each choose two more teams to ally with them. That gives the top four teams a partner to compete with and an alternative.

“We were not the flashiest robot in the competition, but we were consistent,” robotics club adviser Doctor Jacob Day said. “We went through every match and performed comparably in every one. There were a number of teams who had the capability to score more points than us, but their robots only worked some of the time. We finished toward the top because we were reliable.”

The robotics team finished their robot shortly before the competition, allowing only a short lesson on how to drive the robot with the Logitech controller.

“Had we started sooner I think we could have done a lot better,” Esch said. “We were all really happy with how we did. We had Devin Crabtree driving, who is a freshman and the only person who knew how to drive since no one had time to practice. We finished the robot program the day before competition. No one knew what to do with it. So he had about 20 minutes of practice and he did a very good job with it.”

The team operates off of a laptop, because of its mobility and the mishaps in Day’s classroom in the past.

“We were working off one of the computers, but Dr. Day accidently crashed it,” Esch said. “There’s a lot of static electricity in his classroom and if the robot is plugged into the computer and you touch it without it being grounded first it fries the computer. It’s only happened once because after that we’ve made sure we are grounded.”

The competition does not only include the robots competing in the arena, but an interview with the team.

“[The competition] was organized chaos,” Day said. “The robot inspections and judge panels were set for overlapping times so that you had to be aware of what time it was and where you were scheduled to be at all times. I was very excited for, and proud of the team when they finished seventh. They went through some ups and downs throughout the day, but they never gave up. They overcame every challenge that came at them and finished the day as one of the most consistent teams in the competition.”