Robotics Team Update

Brandon Wagonfeld, BHS Blueprint Staff Member

 

After all that hard work and effort, the First Robotics 10,000 Lakes Regional robotics competition finally came.

On April 7, 8, and 9, Blaine High School, or G.E.A.R.s (Great Engineers, Awesome Robots), competed against 62 other robotics teams, including a team from Iowa and a team from the Czech Republic.

First Robotics Stronghold featured robots of all shapes, sizes, and designs, all with the goal of achieving glory, and capturing the opposing team’s alliance.

The game featured two alliances, each with three different teams for a total of six robots. The goal was to score as many points as possible, just as in basically every sport that exists (except Golf).

This could occur in many ways, such as pushing a foam ball into low goals or shooting them into high goals to weaken the opponent’s tower. Points were also scored by crossing the enemy’s defense, weakening them by each crossing. Teams would get bonus ranking points weakening four out of the five enemy defenses.

Finally, at the end of the round, teams could try to surround or even scale the tower. If all three robots were to surround the tower, their alliance would get 15 points (5 for each robot). Scaling the tower would earn the alliance 15 points for just the single robot.

The first day, April 7, featured mainly just practice rounds which allowed teams to work out potential kinks in the robot before the actual meaningful rounds.

The second day featured qualifiers which would determine the teams that would advance to the final found the next day. Out of 63 teams, only 24 would advance. After the preliminaries, G.E.A.R.s was ranked 14th.

The final round was on the last day. Alliances were determined partially by ranking and individual alliance captains. Since there were 24 finalists, naturally there would be 8 alliance captains. The first ranked team picked first, and unsurprisingly picked the second ranked team. Now, since the second place team was already picked, the third ranked team would go.

This continued until the 8th alliance captain made their first pick, and then continued in a snake order with the 8th captain picking again. Unfortunately for G.E.A.R.s, they ended up as the 8th alliance captain, so they were pitted against the 1st alliance and were absolutely annihilated.

We had a great run, and as we have been for the past 8 years, we’ll be back next year.