As the new year takes off, so does the robotics season.

The MSET 7641 team placed seventh in the First Tech Challenge (FTC) on Jan. 23 in Daly City. In addition, the team won the control award at the competition, which ensured them a spot at the regional competition. The more advanced juniors and seniors on the First Robotics Challenge (FRC) team have also begun to build their robot for the upcoming FRC season.

FTC teams are mostly made up of freshmen and sophomores, since the program features simpler robots. It is meant to introduce students into robotics, and as these students become more advanced, they can join the FRC team, which has more complex robots and competitions.

The next FTC competition takes place Jan. 30 in Auburn.

The teams started building their FTC robots in November; since then, they have attended one tournament at Sequoia High on Dec. 5.

“To prepare for this tournament, our team met in the robotics room pretty much every day the week before and just worked on making adjustments to the robot so that it functioned well,” freshman Ankur Garg, member of team 7390 said.

There are three FTC robotics teams, each consisting of around 15 members. As the next few tournaments approach, all of the teams are working furiously to finish final improvements to their robots.

On the other hand, the first FRC competition, which will be preceded by an intense six-week building period, will be on March 13 in Madera. In its first week of planning, the team prototyped and brainstormed robot designs.

This year’s game is modeled after a medieval theme. The basic concept is to design a robot that can get across nine different types of barriers, like a moat or a drawbridge. Then once on the other side, the robot must shoot boulders into the castle and capture the castle by hanging from a bar on the tower.

“Right now, we are in the midst of designing the robot and our strategy for the games,” junior Rachel Won said. “Competition is not exactly in our mindset right now because we need to start getting the parts first, which will happen in week four.”

In roughly two to three weeks, Won said that team would get the actual parts of the robot and put the physical robot together, because currently the design is entirely on the computer. Using a computer designing system called CAD (computer-aided design), the robot is designed electronically  to make sure the geometry and dimensions work when put together in the form of a robot.

“CAD helps us visualize what the robot will do before we [start] actually physically building it and realize that there is a mistake in the robot and lose the competition,” Won said.

As the robotics team gathers its data and material in order to execute this next task, it hopes that the work put during the six-week building period will pay off at FRC and that they will be allowed to pass onto the next level. At the end of the qualification period,  the top eight robots pick two other robots to join their alliance, fighting until there are four left in semifinals and then, finally, two left in finals.  

After attending World Championships in April last year as part of a second pick for the second alliance, the robotics team hopes to lead an alliance to victory with its strong junior and senior lineup.  

“I’m really glad that the juniors and seniors have a good relationship because it allows us to get a lot of work done in stressful situations,” junior FRC member Kai Donez said. “We’re all really good friends outside of robotics as well.”