After just its second year, Carlmont’s robotics team has qualified for the World Championship in Houston, TX. Winning the “Team Spirit Award” in Sacramento, Deep Blue Team 199 went on the win their second Spirit Award last weekend at FIRST’s Silicon Valley Regional.
Now they begin preparations for their first time at the championships. The competition begins April 20 and continues until April 22.
Valerie Wang, an original member of the team, explained their preparations for previous competitions: “We spend the week before preparing and testing any mechanism we want to add to our robot for the matches.”
Matches range from the robot shooting wiffle balls to the robot climbing a rope. After each match, points are given to each team and, at the end, the points are added up.
Countless prototypes are tested for each skill. Andres Raddavero, a freshman on the team, described one of the first test runs for the current robot.
“We put the robot base on the rope and attached weights similar to the weight that the robot will be after complete construction. Everything was going well until the weights started getting lifted off the ground. All of the sudden, the center of the robot snapped and dropped to the ground. We had to start all over again.”
This process of trial and error continues up until the day before the competition when the tools are packed up and sent to the venue for the next day.
According to Kyle Jung, a senior on Team 199, as the championships draw closer, “the team really has to ramp up their work to make the robot as effective as possible before leaving for Houston.”
Much of the same work has to be done as for regional competitions, but now the stakes are even higher as the competitors become more and more challenging.
Not only do they have to prepare the robot for the competition, the team also has to raise $10,000 for travel, lodging, food and other expenses for the trip. They started a GoFundMe a little over a week ago and have already raised over half of their goal.
Announced a Wildcard at the regionals, Carlmont’s robotics team is on its way to the World Championships.
