The robotics club had its first FRC competition last weekend. This year’s challenge involves the robots picking up inflated tubes in the shapes of triangles, circles, and squares and placing them on horizontal pegs on a wall.
The bonus challenge was to make a mini-robot (that’s exactly what it sounds like) race other minibots to climb a 9-foot pole. Patrick Barone ’12, our student team leader, led about twenty other students in building a robot that could be successful at the competition. Our plan was to build a claw that would grab the tubes and build an elevator that would raise the tubes ten feet to the highest peg. William Ellis’12 and mentor Steve Alaniz headed this team.
There was also a minibot team headed by Quinn Wolf ’12 and Jeff Barone ’13 that built a minibot that climbed the pole in under three seconds. After six weeks of planning, designing, building, programming, and testing, the robot was completed at 11 p.m. on Tuesday, February 22, 2011, just one hour before the deadline of midnight that night. Patrick Barone, math teacher and moderator Mr. Michael Couvillon, William Ellis, and Jarrod Buys ’11 stayed behind to complete the autonomous coding and the final preparations to get our robot ready for the competition in a week. We left Dallas on Wednesday for San Antonio. We unloaded the robot at the San Antonio Convention Center then went out to eat on the riverwalk.
The next morning was filled with practice matches and testing our robot. It was a late night as we tried to fix the elevator that brings the tubes up to the top rung to be hung, because it broke in the last practice match. The next morning the qualification matches began and we got off to a quick 2-0 start before lunch with the minibot carrying many of our team’s points. We remained undefeated for the rest of the day as everything was going very smoothly…almost too smoothly.
We entered the day tied for first, undefeated, and very optimistic about our chances to win the tournament. However, we had more problems with the elevator: the minibot failed, and we tied one match to take us out of the lead. However, we still finished the qualification matches in second place at 8-0-1, and we felt very good about our chances to go deep in the elimination round.
After the alliance selection, we won our first round (best two-out-of-three) with two quick wins. We lost one match in the semifinals to a very good team from Houston, the Robonauts, but scraped out a win in the final elimination match. After competing for three straight days, we were exhausted, but also very excited to be in the finals. We were up against two-time world champion team #148, the Robowranglers, and the top-seeded team #16, the Bomb Squad. Our alliance (with team #57 and #245) put up a very good fight, but we were no match for our top-ranked opponents. We lost both of the finals matches, but came away with the silver medal—not bad! We have another competition in April at the Dallas Convention Center where we hope to improve on our awesome performance at San Antonio.
On behalf of our entire team, I would like to thank our sponsors, JC Penny, PTC, Burns Controls, and Jesuit College Prep for their support of our team over the last three years. I would also like to thank Mr. Couvillon, our fearless team leader, Mr. Alaniz, our awesome mentor, and all the parent volunteers who–help after school, on Saturdays, and during fundraisers–for the time and effort that helped our team make it so far.
Visit http://jesuitrobotics.wordpress.com/ to see pictures and videos of the robot as it transformed throughout the building season.
