Seasoned and new members of the Millenium Falcons, the school’s First Robotics Competition team, returned from their first off-season competition at Chezy Champs, which took place from Sept. 27 to 29 at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif., placing No. 33 out of 43 participating teams overall.
“Chezy Champs is a really good competition for new people to go to, mainly because there are such great robots … You want to be able to see a game that is properly played through with those good robots, so that it gives you a better understanding of how the game would typically run,” robotics team captain Sarah Tsu (10) said. “A lot of what we’re doing right now is just training to try to prepare them for that.”
After leaving school early on Sept. 27, the team unloaded their robot — affectionately named Drippy McCool after flute-playing “Star Wars” alien Droopy McCool — and a “pit” containing tools such as power drills, bolts and screw drivers to fix the robot. While most of the team flies to the competition, a trailer containing Drippy McCool was driven by mentor Tu Nyugen. Once the robot was set up, they calibrated it to make sure it worked properly prior to competing in practice matches. Saturday morning, the team arrived at the venue before it opened at 8 a.m. for a series of randomly paired qualification matches that took place until early Sunday, determining approximate rankings for Chezy Champs.
“Friday, during practice matches, our robot had issues with figuring out where it was on the field,” the programming department lead, Anirudha Saligrama (12), said. “There are [software] files on the robot that tells it where April tags, or landmarks, are … and the robot can look at them and figure out where it is. But it needs to know where the April tags are supposed to be. And that part was wrong, so we had to fix it.”
FRC releases a new game theme each January, designed to be as close to real-world engineering as possible. Teams are challenged to build and program robots to compete against each other, following this theme. Since Chezy Champs is an off-season competition, its game theme is the same as the previous season, where the objective is to shoot a ring-shaped object — or a “note” — into either a higher or shorter goal for points. The field is set up so that notes can be picked up on the opposite side of the arena to the goals.
The team’s robot for Chezy Champs is the same one used last season, still adorning a Mike Wazowski and “Sir Hot God” sticker as well as a miniature, 3-D printed frog.
“We had an issue passing notes to other robots on Friday — there is a strategy where you can pick it up from the other side [and] shoot it over to your teammates, but [the robot] wasn’t shooting inside of the field,” Saligrama said. “It was just shooting the pieces way up into space, so we had to physically tune it and turn the speed down so it actually shot it into the field.”
Later, a string of collisions on Sept. 28 and 29 teetered the robot’s performance.
“As soon as we fixed that, we ran to another robot really hard, and our intake sort of fell apart,” Saligrama said. “We fixed it, though, in time for the next match. We ran into another robot again and the intake broke even worse. So we had to fix that. There was a programming issue because the sensor got messed up during the collision.”
The school’s robotics mentor, Klint Kirkconnell, attributes these mistakes to lack of preparation as they only practiced “a couple days before,” and some of the robot’s program was for a different competition. Kirkconnell has mentored the team since its founding year in 2010, when his daughters attended the school. For 14 years, he has watched the team grow both in rankings — as they have won at least one event every year since 2019 — and members.
“We’re going to try to win, but the main thing is for the new team to learn, because we have a very young team,” Kirkconnell said. “Almost all of our members are freshmen and sophomores. We lost a lot of seniors last year, and they are the ones who did most of the work.”
The previous robotics room of two conjoined portables has been converted to the freshman football changing room. Now in room 703, the team looks forward to training new members.
“Since most of our leadership is now just sophomores and juniors, I think that we really just need to be focusing on making sure that they will be able to know what they’re doing next year,” said Tsu.
In the future, the team looks forward to participating in other off-season competitions, such as Battle at the Border — Southern California’s largest off-season FRC competition — at Cathedral Catholic High School and Beach Blitz in Orange County.
“Most of the kids, when they join the team, have never built anything in their life, and then by their fourth year, they’re building robots,” Kirkconnell said.