On February 13th 2016 FTC team Robotheosis competed at the Chicago League Championship. At this championship, Robotheosis placed 2nd overall during qualification matches, won the Rockwell Collins Innovate award and won 3rd place Inspire award. On Saturday, February 13, Parker’s Upper School Robotics Team competed in the FTC Chicago League Championship and performed incredibly well! This competition was larger than any other we have attended this school year. Throughout the year, our team has constructed a robot to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC). The goal of FTC robotics is essentially to design and build a robot that is capable of scoring points in a unique game. The building process has restrictions in parts and size (the robot cannot be larger than an 18” cube, for example). We built two robots this season. One of those robots competed in our last two league competitions, and the new robot that we recently finished building competed in the league championship. Our main strategy is to gain points by climbing a “mountain,” one of the game’s main components. The mountain is a steep, intimidating platform with obstacles and a hanging bar at the top, and if any team’s robot can perform a pull-up on the bar by the end of the game, then that team will most likely win the match. Hanging rewards 80 points, enough to determine a win or loss in most matches. Our robot has amazing, student-designed, half-moon-shaped wheels capable of scaling the mountain reasonably fast and a winch capable of performing a pull-up. A final bonus is given for rotating a signal flag at the top of the hanging bar, and we were the only team that successfully scored this at the league championship.
At this competition, we competed against 18 other teams, only a few of which could also hang on the bar. As part of the league championship, our team gave an engineering presentation, and presented an engineering notebook and robot to a panel of judges. In the qualifying rounds, we were in first place for most of the day but then got edged out of first place in one of the last matches, an amazing achievement. As the second-seeded team, we were able to choose one other team to pair with us as partners going into the championship rounds. We fought valiantly but were knocked out in the semifinals. That was a bummer, and we did not think our team would move on. After the final matches, the award ceremony began. Our team won the Rockwell Collins Innovate award for the originality of our wheels and the thoroughness of our engineering notebook. We also got third place for the “Inspire” award. The Inspire is the most coveted award in FTC, and this is the first year that we have been nominated for the award. Because of competition results combined with the awards that we won, we were one of only four teams at the Championships to be invited to the State Tournament! Woohoo! The State Tournament is Saturday, February 27, 2016 at Elgin Community College. There will be more judging, harder teams and more fun! Our team is very excited, and this week is robotics crunch time. Hopefully, if we work hard, we can compete in the next competition! Please come out and support us. Enjoy some videos from the event via the links below: - Team getting award - Team hearing that they are advancing to state competition Comments are closed.
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