For the newest robotics tournament, our FVHS SLICE team competed in the state championship. Between April 10-12, 50 teams competed, the same as when they had participated in the playoffs, where they must use their robots against each other by shooting balls into hoops to score points.
Strategy and hardware lead senior Haarish Babu said, “Going into this event I was kind of nervous, a little bit excited because we decided to entirely rebuild our robot from the previous two competitions.”
This correlates to how junior and engineering captain Ben Park feels.
“We only got our robot finished a couple days before our first competition, so that gave programming only five days worth of work,” said Park.
Because of this, it offers insight into how uncertain the team initially felt about the robot’s framework design. However, Babu expresses strong confidence in the new design and enthusiastically vouches for its performance.
“Overall, with our result, I was definitely happy with it. We figured with our design going into the first two competitions, we weren’t going to be competitive enough at our state district championships because it’s the best of the best North Carolina teams,” said Babu.
The robot was modified even further for states and optimized for performance in game.
“For the rebuild, we basically took everything apart except for what makes the robot move around and what picks the balls up. We redid our shooting mechanism from something that can shoot balls that are about two wide, to something that spans the entire robot so we can shoot around four. We also made it so instead of having this weird L shaped path that balls have to go through, we made it a straight streamline path and cranked up the speed a lot. So that helped improve how many balls we could shoot and our scoring capabilities,” said Babu.
The team tied for sixth in the state championship. This was already better and more impressive than the lower 44 teams; however, along with this, it had topped the original playoffs placement that had gotten the team into the event in the first place at 12th. The SLICE Robotics’ improvement has further shown an improvement in their skillset when given the opportunity. SLICE Robotics has shown further improvement in their skillset, demonstrating growth when provided with opportunities. From the right amount of time to reassess the previous robot, to the development of its behavior compared to the playoffs, the team’s work in the championship demonstrates its mastery.
