Courtesy of Andrea San Miguel
The weekend of March 9, the Aragon FIRST robotics competition team competed in the Central Valley Regional For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology Robotics Competition. Each year, a theme for the competition is announced in January, giving teams roughly three months to build a robot that caters to that specific topic while dealing with constraints such as cost and material. The 2023 theme was Energize,* encouraging the teams to think about sustainability for the future.
“We [had a] mix of prototyping and seeing what methods were successful and [then came] up with a plan,” said junior Stuti Goel. “We looked at previous robots and used a lot of repeated mechanisms from year to year, so usually we don’t [have to] recreate entirely.”
A key aspect of successful competition is team communication and collaboration in creating the robot.
“I think the main roadblock in our team is communication, not just between the adults supervising and the students participating in robot-building, but also between people in the team,” said junior Aetherfall Hua. “[This] has really affected our team in previous years. It’s a lot better this year, but there’s still room to improve.”
“I think the main roadblock in our team is communication, not just between the adults supervising and the students participating in robot-building, but also between people in the team”
While the FIRST Robotics Competition team is ultimately the team that competes, success has a lot to do with collaboration across other sub teams, like the business team. This also includes marketing and outreach teams that focus on promoting the team’s interest and spirit to the public through local events.
“Our purpose [on the business team] is to make sure our technicians team is fully in red and black, to make sure that our merch reflects the team spirit at competitions and the team-specific merch of the year,” said senior Sarah Kaplan. “That was a new thing that we did, and a lot of it is also geared toward focusing on presentation.”
For the competition in Fresno, the team arrived March 10 and was allotted a day to practice before the competition began. They also underwent an inspection check to ensure that the bot ran safely, meaning there were no wires exposed, and the bot remained inside a frame perimeter and drove smoothly. If there were any mechanical or programming issues, they needed to be solved before the competition began the next day to perform successfully. After remaining at the competition venue past 8 p.m., the primary issues with the function of the robot had been solved.
“On [the first day there were] a lot of mechanical issues,” said senior Thomas Trimble. “The people who are in charge of actually making the robot and getting it up to shape physically had a lot of work to do. We had to maintain very high team morale and a lot of practicing, testing and trial and error, but we made it through qualification day.”
After a full day of competing in qualification matches, where schools form alliances to then complete specific tasks demonstrating the capabilities of their robots, the team was placed last out of 38 teams.
“Outreach did so much work before the competition: they made videos, they [wrote] essays, they made presentations to judges … it was incredible and, because of them, we were able to get [the Engineering Inspiration Award]”
“We got really unlucky [on Saturday],” said junior Luke Phillips. “We got tough alliances [and] were put against a lot of good teams, so we had a really rough first day.”
On Sunday, the final day of qualification matches, the Aragon team was not chosen to form an alliance with any of the top eight teams competing, so they left the competition venue early.
The winning teams from different competitions nationally qualify for FIRST Worlds Championship, which will be held in Houston, Texas.** In addition to the winning teams,*** two teams are selected for awards to qualify for the championship as well. The first award is called the Impact Award, which is awarded to the team with the most community impact. The second award is the Engineering Inspiration Award, which is given to the team that clearly demonstrates success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering in their community.
“Through the process of trying to get the Impact Award, we won [the Engineering Inspiration Award],” Trimble said. “Outreach did so much work before the competition: they made videos, they [wrote] essays, they made presentations to judges … it was incredible and, because of them, we were able to get this award.”
The last time the team attended Worlds was ten years ago, making this a significant milestone for the Aragon Robotics Team. The competition will take place from Apr. 19 to Apr. 22.****
*An earlier version of this article mistakenly wrote that the theme for the competition was “Volunteer to Energize the Future” and has been corrected to “Energize.“
**An earlier version of this article mistakenly named the competition as “VEX Robotics World Championship,” which has been corrected to “FIRST Worlds Championship;” the location was also corrected from “Dallas, Texas,” to “Houston, Texas.”
***An earlier version of this article mistakenly wrote that the awards were synonymous with being a wildcard team, which has since been corrected.
****An earlier version of this article mistakenly wrote that the competition would take place from “Apr. 25 to May 4” and has been corrected to “Apr. 19 to Apr. 22.”
