Following in the footsteps of long-established Los Altos robotics team 0399, Los Altos team 0453 capped its second year with a fifth-place finish at the annual Global Conference on Educational Robotics’ International Botball Tournament over the summer.
Co-captains Alex Shen and Aiden Chavda organized the newer team as eighth-graders at Egan Junior High School last year. The eight team members participated in their first international competition at last year’s GCER.
“It’s only been a year, but after being exposed to the high level at (the GCER) last year, we had a better understanding of the tricks and strategies that the best teams use,” Shen said. “The second year, we were just more prepared.”
Held July 16-21 in St. Augustine, Fla., the event featured 38 high school teams from the United States and Europe. Not to be outdone by its younger squad, Los Altos team 0399 placed third.
Botball requires teams to design fully autonomous robots that are preprogrammed to run a course for points. Teams compete in three rounds to determine the winners. The first-round results decide how many points a robot can collect by itself on a full game board.
“Another portion of the competition is on one-half of the board,” team coach Gail Shen said. “There’s a mirror image on the other side of the board and pieces in the middle that are a shared space. You’re going head-to-head against another team who’s running on the other The last part of the competition is a double-elimination bracket where the teams also go head-to-head.
“What sets the global competition apart is that you really need to work extra hard on your robots, because you’re competing against the world’s best,” said Kathleen Xie, vice captain of the older team.
According to Chavda, the younger team studied the strategies of the established teams to place at the regional and international tournaments.
Alex Shen added that the team was inspired by Los Altos’ older group.
“(The older team’s) designs are really very competitive always,” he said. “They have been for … many years. We looked up to them … and they were the best team when we joined.”
The older team maximized points by tackling a ring-sorting task. To get points in the challenge, teams needed to build a robot that grabs rings of various colors off a stand and place them on their color-corresponding buildings.
“We brainstormed an idea to grab the rings from the ring stand and then have a metal piece at the bottom to release them – kind of like a dispensing machine,” Xie said. “That one was our final design.”
However, to come up with a competition-ready robot, teams went through months of iterations before the competition.
“There were obviously many tweaks because, after building the design, you find a lot of problems while you’re coding the robot,” Xie said. “So, we had to consistently tweak, consistently tune and refine the design.”
Adapting on the spot
According to Chavda, the younger team had a month to design its GCER robot and met every day for up to four hours to meet the deadline. Even then, it was still necessary to modify the team’s robots during the competition in response to other teams’ strategies.
When the younger team was slated to face one of the top teams, members had to change their robot the night before the last day of the competition. That’s because the other team’s strategy involved collecting cubes.
“We made sure that we got the cubes first,” Alex Shen said. “We changed a couple things just to counter their strategy better.”
According to Xie, the competition provided new opportunities to learn and improve their robots for next year.
“It was intimidating but also very exciting,” she said. “We got to learn a lot from the designs that other teams around the world come up with. … They’re all very creative and come up with different ways of doing tasks.”
The younger team plans to get better and expand the program going forward.
“We do hope to get more people involved and get more involved with the community,” Chavda said. “We want to lead some of the training for the younger members and come back again next year.”
