The NWA robotics team, Sky Rat Robotics, made it to the Oregon State Championship and finished in the top half of all contestants this March.
The Arts After Hours class progressed to State after placing third in a district competition. Even though it was the team’s first year competing, their lack of experience did not put them at a disadvantage against pre-existing teams.
The team made sure they could easily move their robot, because in order to win competitions, each team’s robot must perform a certain amount of tasks and maneuvers, such as throwing balls into a hoop or parking on a tile. Each year, competitions include a different challenge. To meet these requirements robots from past years add new attachments, like a catapult, while keeping the original wheels and skeleton.
Sky Rat Robotics’ robot is a four-wheeled cube with a small compartment to hold the wiffle balls used in competition. The team has not given it an official nickname but some people have started referring to the robot as sophomore Kai Liotta’s pet because of how often he brings it home.
“There was this one time where we were doing driver practice and I was so confident and I was like, oh ya I’m the best at driving and then I immediately ran into my dads shins,” said Liotta.
The competition matches take place in a field with two opposing teams consisting of two robots. Most of the competitions happened in high school gyms so the audience could sit in the bleachers. The area right next to the field referred to as the pit, was reserved for the currently competing teams and only allowed four to five members at a time.
“[Before the competition] each robot has an inspection, so it fits the requirements,” said Nathaniel Wilson, a junior on the robotics team. “It has to be 18 inches cubed. Then you get a lot of time to strategize… and see [other teams] robots. A lot of teams look around for potential teammates when playoffs happen.”
A competition is split into two parts; the first section, where a person from the team can manually control the robot and the second section, where the robot must rely fully on pre-written code to maneuver the course. Some maneuvers are worth more points than others, such as throwing the balls in a specific color pattern or completing all tasks in a certain amount of time.
It is also possible to commit, which increases the score of another team. For example, it is illegal to touch another robot when it is parking on the tile. Some teams use this to their advantage by forcing another team’s robot to touch them while parking, thereby gaining points.
“Autonomous is really complicated, especially when you think about the other robots also moving around at the same exact time,” said Noah Gonzales, a sophomore on the team. “We sometimes spend half the class period just discussing what we want to do with the robot and… strategizing.”
The team started the year with a $3,800 budget from an anonymous STEM donation to the school. The First Tech Challenge suggests a $5,000 budget for each team and some teams even ask for $15,000. Each competing robotics team has the option to buy a starting kit to build their robot, but it costs $637. Further customization is also required to make one robot pull ahead of others.
When building their robot, Sky Rat Robotics mainly broke into two separate groups: hardware and software. The hardware group was in charge of physically building the robot and making sure it fit design requirements as well as easily maneuvering the course. The software group did all the coding that was applied to the autonomous part of competition. Later, sophomores Thomas Urang and Liotta, broke off into another group to work on computer assisted design, which is used to create 3D blueprints for new, custom robot parts.
“You can sketch out the dimensions of a part that you want to make,” said Urang. “You can [then] 3D print, or laser cut, or waterjet cut, or whatever it is, to manufacture those parts. We are currently using it to design an intake so that we can get balls from the floor instead of having to have a human load on the bot. So that’ll just make us faster at cycling and shooting balls.”
The team currently meets every Tuesday to fine tune programs and fundraise for future additions to their robot next year. It initially started because of student interest after Urang, Gonzales, Liotta and Anthony Casuga discovered the school used to have a robotics team from the then Data and Statistics AAH teacher Ben Saeks.
“I told them if they could get enough interest, and the school was willing to support it, I would coach the team this year,” said Saeks. “I’m very grateful that they did because it has been wonderful getting back into the world of FIRST (our robotics organizing body) and seeing what the team has been able to achieve!”
