Robotics FTC team 4345 wins two awards

Aragon Robotics 4345 First Tech Challenge (FTC) competed in the FTC Cisco Qualifiers on Jan. 6 against 15 other teams. Despite initially placing 11th overall in the competition, the team received the Think Award and second place Inspire Award. The second place Inspire Award gave the team a 71 percent lottery chance at making regionals.

The competition began with robot inspection and team judging, where the whole FTC team was questioned about different aspects of their robots.

“The day started with inspection, and our inspection didn’t go really well; we were having some issues with our programming,” said sophomore outreach leader Shelby Cherkas. “We had prepared judging previously, but we had to reformat because there were some people who weren’t there. ”

The next stage in the competition was the games, in which Aragon found mixed results. To prove their engineering prowess, teams would collect, sort and transport items to the center of a field or program their robots to perform specific tasks.

“[There] are two kinds of challenges: we have programming and mechanical challenges. Some programming challenges are during autonomous phase, where you can only have pre-recorded instructions sent into your bot,” said sophomore Nick Ping. “Another programming intensive challenge is color identification. We’re supposed to knock a cube off a little spot on the field, and that would earn us a lot more points.”

However, due to mechanical challenges with their robot, Aragon was forced to adapt. The team finished the day with two wins out of the five matches they played.

“We had a string break. We had some acrylic panels snap, and we had some chains fall off,” said sophomore Randall Liu, an engineer for the Aragon Robotics team. “A lot of the time we improvised, or had to take whole things out, but some things, like the chain falling off, could just get fixed between rounds.”

After placing eighth among the 16 teams, the last chance for the FTC Team 4345 to qualify for regionals was the Inspire Award, a trophy given to the best overall team in categories including engineering, design and community outreach. Aragon Robotics had compiled each of these categories, from prototyping to team business to member biographies, in their engineering notebook, cataloging team meetings and module designs.

“Our engineering notebook, this year especially, was very organized, and it had very specific sections pertaining to different parts of the robot. The judges were able to see all our prototyping ideas and design processes,” said junior Riddhi Mehta, one of the lead organizers for the notebook. “The judges were able to see all our prototyping ideas and design processes.”

FTC team 4345 also improved outreach and business from years prior.

“I spent a lot of time talking to the judges about our outreach, our business plan and our media,” Cherkas said. “We talked about the great parts of our team that we’ve been working a lot this year, and they seemed to be really impressed with that.”

Senior Jacob Webb, coach of FTC team 4345, believes assembled a strong team this year.

“Our FTC team was chosen out of the people we thought were going to be the most dedicated,” Webb said. “We’re trying to continue that and keep it more competitive, or more competitive than it was in the past. We’re putting a lot more hours in, which allows us to more competitive.”

Receiving the second place Inspire Award placed Aragon in fourth place overall in the tournament. However, because the third top team had already qualified, Aragon could be entered into a lottery for the next spot at regionals.

“Third in line [team] gets entered in a lottery to qualify, so we have a 71 percent chance of qualifying in the lottery,” Cherkas said. “I was so proud because our team has put in a lot of work this year both mechanically and also in business and outreach.”

This award offered the team a reassuring feeling of hard work.

“During the whole competition, our bot didn’t do so well,” Ping said. “Winning the Think Award really cemented that even if something doesn’t go right, people can still recognize that this [robot] has potential.”