Having a very productive year and a brilliant group of students, Team 2827 was beyond competitive at the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). During the first semester, students began to learn the ropes of coding and building smaller projects in preparation for the competition. By January, FIRST released the prompt, giving schools seven weeks to design, build, and bag their robots.
The official kickoff for the competition was January 7, and the robotics team got right on it. Their tricky assignment, titled STEAMWORKS, gave them several difficult tasks to achieve with their robot. Their tasks included being able to make their robot lift gears, deliver fuel in the form of balls, and climb a thin rope.
“The first thing we did was build our chassis, which is the foundation of the robot, and everything is built off of it,” says team member, Iliana Marrujo. This base has motors, wheels, and wiring attached to it, and it is essentially metal frame to build on top of.
Electrical work needed to be done after the frame was built. This crucial step entailed having electrical current flowing the proper way in order to have electricity enter the robot and be able to receive signals from a computer. Without having done this correctly, the robot could not function appropriately. The gear catch was then attached for the robotics team to fulfill the requirements of the competition. This particular device needed to be able to carry a gear to the central tower of the playing field so that it lifts out of the tower to power the rotor machine.
Part of the requirement entailed that the robot should be able to attach itself to a rope and then climb it. The robotics team achieved this by building a winch on the back part of the robot. This winch would rapidly spin to catch on and coil around the rope lifting the robot. Other elements and components were then built to fully complete it.
After completion, bagging the robot was the final task before the competition. Only weeks were left ahead of them before they were put to the test on everything they had been working on for the past seven weeks.
The much-anticipated competition arrived the very first week of March. Part of competing against other schools involves forming alliances with these schools to make their way to the top. The first day was quite a success, considering they held third place in the competition. The second day was not so lucky as “there was a turn for the worse and bad alliances were made,” says Iliana. The rest of the competition did not end so well for the team as they moved down in their ranking. By the end of the competition, they had placed thirty-fourth out of sixty-six schools.
Great disappointment lay with the entire robotics team for their unfavorable drop in ranking. But there was still great pride within the team for their extremely hard work throughout the year. “Being a student-run club, we engineered and built this robot all on our own and were happy to see it do so well in competition,” says Stefany James, one of the builders for the robot itself. “This was a year like no other for Crown City Robotics, and I hope we continue to improve in the years to come.”
We will be wishing them luck next year in the competition.
