Only three teams from Warsaw Area Career Center were allowed to compete today in the 8th Annual Bloomington Robotics Club & Ivy Tech Community College Robotics Tournament. Since Abbi Richcreek teaches two sections of Engineering-Robotics 1, she had an inner-class competition to figure out who would be the top three teams to represent WACC at the tourney. The three teams who won the right to travel to the Indiana Center for the Life Sciences, Bloomington, today will be, team 1: Pedro Monsivais, Tanner Lockridge, Collin Marshall, Brad Nethercutt; team 2: John McGurn, Nick Moore; and team 3: Kyle Harter, Brandon Cervantes, Marcelo Brito and Derek Ault. Clayton Goble helped all the teams and is a back-up. “Everyone in Indiana had the same amount of time to work on this competition. It was released Oct. 1. Also, they had opportunities after school to work on it or they could do it at home,” Richcreek stated. The Bloomington tournament is the first competition of the season for her classes, she said. The three WACC teams will be competing in the “Light the Lamp 2” contest at Bloomington. According to the official rules, Lamp 2 has an added 30-second autonomous period at the beginning of each match. During this period, the robots operate via on-board programming to pick up pucks and move them to a corner of the table. The radio-controlled part of the competition requires teams to move pucks from the center of the table through the opening of the appropriate color goal. There are four different-sized and -shaped goals, with the more difficult goals worth more points. Marshall is the driver for team one. “We designed our robot to get under the hockey pucks,” he explained. “We have a rotating chain on the left to act as a conveyor belt to pull the puck onto the platform. Once we get the puck on the platform, we move the robot to a different slot. We rotate the platform to the angle of the slot and reverse the motion of the chain to push the puck off the platform and onto the slot.” To program their robot, Monsivais said they used a program called EZC. “We had to bind the motors on our robot on the program to give them specific functions,” Monsivais stated. Lockridge did the programming for team 1’s robot. He said the programming for the movement wasn’t too hard. The autonomous programming, however, was a little harder. Team 1 is ready for today’s contest, Nethercutt said. “I think that we are as ready as we can possibly be,” Nethercutt stated. “With the time we had to build and program, we had a lot of trial and error. Some circumstances were beyond our control, limiting us, but I feel we have done everything we could to prepare ourselves.” As for a team goal, Nethercutt said as long as they beat one other team, they’ll be happy. In some ways team 2’s robot is similar to team 1’s, McGurn said. The big difference is that team 1 has a conveyor while team 2 has a claw. The claw can move up and down, open and turn sideways. “We have a forklift style so we can hold more pucks,” McGurn said. “I just expect to do as good as possible so we can come home with a victory or have at least tried,” Moore said about his team’s goal for today. Moore built the robot, and McGurn programmed it. The other team members were unable to travel to Bloomington. “I used the flat sheets to be able to scoop up the pucks so we can pick up as many as possible,” Moore explained about the design of their robot. In the front are multi-directional wheels so it can turn a lot faster. “I like programming so it wasn’t too hard,” McGurn noted, though he was still working a few bugs out as of Friday. Ault explained team 3’s robot. It has a plate that can pick up about 6 pucks at a time. It flips backward and dumps the pucks onto a conveyor belt. Unlike other teams, team 3’s robot claw is fixed and doesn’t rotate. “It seemed like the more efficient way, to have a stable claw than a rotating one,” Ault explained. As the driver and builder of the robot, Ault has the highest goals of anyone in Richcreek’s classes for today’s contest. “I hope to place in the top 10,” he said.
