Coming off the heels of a World Championship appearance last year in St. Louis, ART is hard at work preparing for the 2013-2014 year. With the many new changes the Aragon robotics team (ART) has made, there also come new challenges.
On Oct. 4-5, ART entered an off-season CalGames competition held at Fremont High School. The CalGames challenge was the same as the World Championships challenge: to throw frisbees into a goal. The robotics team experienced wireless communication problems in the cage on the first day. The 2013 robot with them also malfunctioned on Saturday, and the team realized the robot’s shooter was not working correctly. However, the team made up for the technical problem with a change in strategy. By the end of the two day competition, ART had won two of the eight matches played.
“CalGames is in the past now and there’s nothing we can do about it except to accept that the shooter didn’t work right, and move on,” says sophomore Miranda Morse.
New member and sophomore Ken Preiser says, “It was fun as I got to learn what all the important things to know are… I was pretty satisfied for a first time experience in the competitive setting.”
This year, the team has 50 students, ten more than in previous years, working together to build robots to conquer the challenges the competitions will call for.
Co-captain and senior Priyam Das says, “This was slightly in part that we do have a bigger shop compared to two years ago, so we wanted to expand the team to accommodate more students…It’ll be a little more of a challenge trying to organize things with ten more people.”
Director of Finances and senior Nathan Zhang also has concerns as he says, “This year about half our team is composed of new members. We have to take that into account for training…and there are a lot of safety concerns.”
This expansion allows subgroups to focus on specific goals and avoid distractions from other aspects of the business subgroups. One subgroup is Outreach, which will focus on getting the ART name out into the community and act as the face of the team.
“Outreach is important because we want people to know about the Aragon Robotics Team. We want people to be inspired to go into the engineering and science fields. It is part of our goal not only to build robots, but to get other people interested in it too,” says Director of Public Relations and senior Darrell Ten.
As part of this commitment, the Robotics Team has already exhibited at the San Mateo County Fair over the summer.
Last year, the team competed in two challenges. After winning the Central Valley Regional, marking their first regional win, ART was invited to St. Louis for the World Championships.
When questioned about World Championships this year for the team, Co-captain Sean Gao says, “We’re going to try to make championships again. Hopefully it will happen, but it’s not really a realistic goal for us. Depending on the challenge this year that could change.”
Other members of the team have higher hopes. Zhang points to the team’s previous success and says, “Now that we’ve been able to go for two years, we’d really like to keep that tradition.”
Das says, “Moving forward this year, we want to try to maintain our standards of going to two competitions with the robot and performing well, at least making it to eliminations every single time in the competitions.”
However, the team must first raise enough money to finance its operations. Each year the team has to pay for parts, competition registration, and travel fees. Registration per competition costs $5,000 alone.
Gao says, “Raising enough money is always an issue for us. The past couple years we’ve always been kind of low on funds.”
Zhang says, “[Having made it to St. Louis] does make fundraising quite a bit easier especially since companies now recognize our team has the capabilities to reach the top level of competitions. It is also a great morale booster because from the start of the team until two years ago we actually never managed to go to St. Louis.”
This year ART has eighty sponsors which they hope to contact for supplies and money. The team is working on applying for grants and engaging more into the Aragon community, for example by offering an embroidery service.
Moving forward, the robotics team is waiting for the game challenge to come out in early 2014 to start building a new robot. They hope to compete in the Sacramento Regional in March and the Silicon Valley Regional in April.
On a final note, Das says, “We pride ourselves in being student run, student built, and student based. That’s a key part of ART.”
