Brentwood’s Boys Robotics Team is gearing up for the state competition which takes place tomorrow, March 4th. While they’re getting ready to bring home a win, you can get educated on all things robotics! For starters, the state competition actually involves Missouri and Kansas teams. Want to know more? Keep reading.
With new spring activities fast approaching, many winter extracurriculars are reaching new heights as their seasons close; chief among them is Boys Robotics, who recently finished #1 overall in their league and are headed to State this March! Robotics State stands apart from other state competitions in various ways, just as robotics itself is unique among other winter activities.
As current junior and robotics team co-captain Kevin Ou described, “Each year is a different game. Teams would have to build a robot that can accomplish certain tasks to score points. Each match is randomized and played in 2v2. A team could be your alliance in one match but could be your opponent in another. The team with the highest score wins.”
This year’s game is one of the craziest too! Muhammed Chaudhry, a senior who helped construct the robot, describes the current game, “This year, there’s these poles of different heights. There’s large, medium, and small, as we like to call them, and the robot picks up a cone and puts it on different poles depending on the points.” In addition to the 90 seconds of normal playing time, a robotics match consists of 2 extra periods: the autonomous section and the Endgame.
The Autonomous period of the game is one that the drivers of the robots have no control over. It’s up to the coders to program a series of tasks with the goal of getting the most points that the robot completes before control is handed over to the drivers. The Endgame, by comparison, is much simpler. The drivers maintain control of the robot, but the rules of the game change drastically, altering points or introducing brand new opportunities for more points than were previously available during the normal playing time.
With a constantly changing competition, adapting and changing with each new game or challenge can be hard. Luckily, our robotics team managed to make a seamless transition between last season and this one and has been using a modified version of a previous robot. Chaudhry recounts, “Our robot has this claw that we use to pick up, and we have this lift that we built from Gobilda. So it’s just a different version of the old robot. It’s just like a different version, like 2.0 type stuff. We really improved it.”
And they have certainly improved it! Ou, who has also been coding for robotics since he joined in 8th Grade, describes his work this year, “This year we have dive into Roadrunner, which is a program that helps the robot map itself on the actual playing field. Once you set everything up, the robot will go exactly where it should on the field, which makes programming the autonomous system easier and reliable.”
