By Naomi Tsuang
Staff Writer
The Beach Cities Robotics Team, consisting of Mira Costa and Redondo Union High School students, placed third out of 75 teams at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology Robotics Championship in St. Louis, Missouri from April 27-30.
High school students from 40 countries and all 50 states competed in the competition. There were 600 total teams at the competition that were broken up into eight groups of 75 teams.
“I’m really happy,” Design Lead and junior Barbara Garrison said. “I just wanted to make it to [the championships]. How far we got wasn’t super important to me because I was still able to see a bunch of other awesome robots and spend time with the team.”
The competition gave participating teams six weeks to build, design and program a 120 pound robot. The team started building their robot in January using a 3D computer model. The final product was a robot with eight wheels and two cameras used to maneuver around obstacles during the competition.
“I was happy to be able to see and be part of the work behind the scenes,” Garrison said. “It was stressful trying to put in as many hours as possible but the mentors were there to help correct mistakes and pick up any slack or more complex parts we needed help with, so I felt comfortable.”
The beginning of the competition consisted of qualification matches. The team was grouped with two other random robots and played against another alliance which is a group of three other teams. During the game, robots had to be able to shoot boulders which are big balls into targets and climb over obstacles in order to earn ranking points. The ranking points earned by each alliance are added to each teams’ scores and the eight teams with the highest number of ranking points at the end of the games get to pick their alliances for playoffs. After that, it’s bracket elimination structure and each round is determined by best two out of three matches.
“When you get to a world competition, the amount of engineering and skills and resources is truly amazing,” Campbell said. “You’re really competing against the best teams in the world. It’s amazing to see their ideas and to see how their teams operate and problem solve because they came up with ideas that we didn’t even think of.”
The Beach Cities Robotics team placed second at the Los Angeles Regional competition from March 9-12 which helped the team to qualify for the championships.
“When you compete in regionals and local events, you see a lot of teams from around the area and you get to see how they solve [problems],” Campbell said. “At a regional competition, there’s probably only five to six really good teams out of 60 so the [championships] are much more competitive.”
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