After VEX Robotics team 95071X Extremity qualified for the World Championship this February, they almost immediately began preparing for the prestigious Dallas tournament on May 6-14. Part of their preparation process has been hosting scrimmages against other schools in room 502.
“We were very excited [when we first qualified] as we put in a lot of effort to qualify for Worlds this year,” sophomore Krishna Muddu said. “We just were ready to start making our new Worlds robot to keep up with the new standards within Worlds.”
95071X Extremity consists of freshman Daniel Yeh; Muddu; juniors Alec Guan, Richard Lee, Adit Sharma and Bryan Zhao and seniors Alex Yaung and Luke Zhang. Due to its success, the team has become well known in the local robotics scene throughout the current season, leading teams to contact them asking to scrimmage. They also looked for teams to scrimmage against through community Discord servers.
This season’s competition, called High Stakes, requires teams to build small robots that drive around a competition field collecting game elements to drop them off in goals. The game is played 2v2, with two sets of two teams forming an alliance for the match.
95071X Extremity invites 12-15 teams at time to the school and follows a practice schedule simulating multiple matches in one afternoon. The matches include an autonomous period for the robot and a driver controlled period which allows the robot’s driver, Lee, to practice controlling the robot manually.
“[During scrimmages] we realized a few offensive strategies that we can use for worlds that will help improve our autonomous time, like specific mechanisms on how to steal game elements from other teams,” Muddu said.
The teams the school has practiced against come from Dublin to Cupertino and are some of the top teams from NorCal that have qualified for Worlds. Some teams the school has practiced against are 11101B Barcbots, a garage-based team from Cupertino; 10009A Arc Robotics, a garage-based team from San Ramon and 1000A Foothill Robotics, a team from Foothill High.
Muddu, who works on the hardware of the robot, said the team realized many of their parts were bent during a scrimmage, causing them to shift from their previous building strategy which aimed to minimize the robot’s weight and focus on improving structure.
With less than two weeks remaining until Worlds, the team is focusing on fine tuning the robot. They will continue to host scrimmages until they leave for the tournament.
“Especially with all the local teams who qualify to Worlds, we all know each other very well throughout the whole school year season,” Muddu said. “We just like to give it back to the community, them to us and us to them.”
