Robotics Fun

By MAX LITVAK ‘20

We’ve all seen Mr. Bland and Mr. Ball recieve trophies from the robotics team for winning this and winning that, but I’m guessing pretty much no one has much of a clue what robotics actually does. This past weekend, some members of the team—Tony Tao (I), Avery Miller (I), Ryan Shue (IV), and Emily Hong (II)—went to Chantilly, Virginia for a tournament that was hosted at the National Air and Space Museum.

Tony gave me a synopsis of how tournaments work. There are two events, a qualifying round and a skills round, each of which has two parts. In the qualifying round, teams of two robots face off against each other. Each robot has to take different color cubes—which are about five inches tall—and stack them on top of each other. The team with the most cubes stacked at the end wins. Stacking the cubes is not easy. Tony  told me the cubes have no notches and “slide around a lot.” The colors of the blocks also matter: if you stack blocks of all different colors or all of the same, you can get extra points. Since Ryan’s robot was picked to compete, he was the driver.

Each match in the qualifying round begins with an autonomous face-off during which the robots compete without a driver. The teams must program their robots to stack the cubes on their own. Unfortunately, because Milton’s robot broke the rules by crossing onto the other team’s side, they had to adjust the robot’s autonomous program. After the robots finish executing their programs, the drivers take over and control the robots for the second half of the qualifying match.  

The second event is called skills. In skills, only one robot goes at a time in order to test the robot’s undisturbed ability to stack as many cubes as possible in one minute. Like in the qualifying round, the skills round is broken up into two parts, one where the robot is driven and one where it is run autonomously. Ryan’s robot excelled in the skills event because of its speed, which matters much more in the skills round than in the team one. It could only stack about eight cubes—which still seems like a lot to me—whereas other teams’ robots could stack up to ten or even eleven; however, Tony said that Ryan’s robot could stack the blocks about “10 seconds faster.” In the qualifying round, Ryan’s robot fared worse for the above reasons.

Ryan’s robot was selected by Nova Systemic, the tournament’s sponsor company, because of its high skill rating, but the team also has other robots that specialize in different categories. Tony’s five-foot-six robot, for example, can impressively stack twelve blocks but is not as good at the skills competition.

Milton played nine games, and from talking to Tony, it seemed like the team had a great time: they “met a lot of cool people” and even got to practice under a real space shuttle. Some of the members are very interested in space, especially Avery. I will leave Milton’s placement undisclosed as all that matters is that the team had fun. . .

Tony also told a funny story that took place during their trip home—well it’s more upsetting than funny, especially in light of Monday morning’s assembly. During their trip home, with the fear of the coronavirus on their minds, all four students wore masks. While in the airport, Tony explained that they were getting a lot of funny looks, which he thought was because some of the members are Asian. One person in a car, Tony said, even drove out of their way just to take a picture of the group. We all heard the assembly on Monday, but many of us probably didn’t take it to heart. From talking to Tony, it has become apparent to me that the coronavirus has caused a lot of subconscious and some conscious bias towards Asians. We all need to keep this in mind as we go forward.

On a lighter note, the team looks forward to competing in the State level tournament, which is coming up on March 16th. The team is hard at work trying to stack more blocks and improving their autonomous.