With an addition of many students, this year’s robotics team was eager for their season to begin. The addition of students helped this year’s robotics team to perform better this year in competitions compared to the last few years. Additionally, the group also had four more programmers this year to help out with the major programming sides of the robot. 

  The team traveled to Chicago and Peoria for their tournaments. The last few years for the robotics team the traveling parts of the competition was the roughest part.

  Junior Joseph Humphrey said, “Travel was more fluent and controlled. There were definitely bumps along the way but experience definitely makes these competitions smoother. For fun times, like hotels and eating arrangements, we came together as a team and were able to enjoy the resting time we had.” 

  For the robot this year, the team created a pneumatic system to grab cones and cubes and place them on platforms specifically designed for them. They didn’t need a climber system like they had to do a year ago, but that helped bring out the artistic side of the members due to having fewer materials they needed to design the robot. 

  It still didn’t stop them from going for the average tower build for the robot. This year they also had to deal with multiple challenges in which they tipped over the robot, but the robot took it like a champ and nothing broke. Even after the robot got hit by another robot at full speed. 

  No matter how much students prepared, struggles were inevitable. 

  Robotics advisor Alexis Rivera shared, “Adding the PID’s(A PID, helps the robot know where to move when the team doesn’t have control of the robot for the first few seconds of the match) to the robot was the most we struggled with, mostly because it was a coding issue that took 2 weeks to fix. ” 

  There were many problems that happened during the tournaments. Rivera shared one of the major problems that has happened during said tournaments which includes “when team 4096, Control Z, Hit our robot when they had no control over it. We repaired the damages in only a couple of hours”

  The Robotics team was able to get by this year with very minimal damages and much more learning about robotics and how to build a sustainable robot compared to the other years that they have been in operation. The students are excited to see what the next year will bring them.