Our robot was massively improved this month and we also did much better in the tournaments than before.

About Robotics

At my school (SSAE) we have a robotics class that we can take as an alternative to engineering; the “class” consists of building a robot from scratch using VEX parts and battling them against other schools.

Sadly, it isn’t BattleBots. Although… the way I play it… Anyways! Since the beginning of this semester, our team hasn’t been doing all that well; it was largely a lack of commitment, but we’ve been working hard this month.

I’m not going to explain the game in depth (it’s a 200-page manual, geez) but the goal is to score your color of ring onto a stake and put it in the positive corners. You can also score the other team’s color into the negative; there are other elements, but that’s the gist of it.

Improvements this month

• Added wheels to the ring carrier to make it able to score.
• Added a shaft to keep the stake relatively consistent
• Added simple autonomous to get us to win points
• Added a motorized intake to grab the rings

Once I added the carrier wheels, the motivation all came back for us to improve; that was the addition that made our bot score!

Placements / Performance

I realize that it’s hard to have context for match quality, this being my first recap and all. That being said, we’ve been doing solid, scoring consistently and getting the autonomous to work most of the time.

Our match stats (only for High Stakes, the other games are different teams)

During the awards ceremony our team was awarded the skills champion trophy for the year, thats extra special because unlike some trophies which get granted 20-30 times in a year there’s only the one skills champ!

This month was by far and away our best! We got invited to the All Stars competition (somehow???) and ranked 7th overall.

We won the first 5 games and were comfortably tied for first in the competition; after that, we faced the top teams from the state and got knocked to 7th.

We got to choose our alliance, which caused much drama in the school, and we ended up losing the first game after that :/

Thanks for reading!