At their first regional competition in San Francisco on March 15-17, the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) team, the MSET Fish (team 649), earned a spot at the World Championships in Houston. That competition will take place on April 17-20.

After a six-week build season and a month of tuning their robot’s software, the team put their robot, now with the finalized name of “Sea Devil,” to the test at the competition, finishing as a part of the second-place alliance along with the Bay Orangutans (team 5499) from Berkeley High School and Cardinal Robotics (team 4159) from Lowell High School. The team also earned the Quality Award for the robustness of the robot’s design.

In addition, the team earned the Engineering Inspiration award at the Silicon Valley Regional competition on March 29-31 for their outreach programs such as leading hands-on workshops at the Saratoga Library. They also made it to the semifinal round in that competition.

In FRC, each game is played with two alliances of three teams each. The alliances compete against one another to score more points by completing a variety of tasks. This year, tasks included picking up and placing balls and panels and climbing a platform. At the San Francisco competition, the team was the captain of the second-place alliance.

The San Francisco competition began with 79 qualifying matches, where teams played with random alliances. After the qualifying matches, the team was in the fourth seed. Alliance selection followed, where the top teams select other teams to join their alliance.

The highest seed team in an alliance is considered the alliance captain. After alliance selection, the Fish became the alliance captains of the third seed alliance. After moving past the quarterfinals and semifinals, the Fish were pitted against an alliance with two of the top teams in the area: Bellarmine’s Chezy Poofs (team 254) and Mountain View’s Spartan Robotics (team 971). The Chezy Poofs were last year’s FRC World Champions and had won six regionals at the side of Spartan Robotics before.

After losing 2-0 in the best of three final, the Fish team was placed as the captain of the second-place alliance, qualifying the team for the FRC World Championships.

“The results were kind of what I was expecting from the tournament,” club president Bassil Shama said. Even though Shama felt the team was “really strong going into this year,” he said he was not surprised by the loss to world-level teams 254 and 971.

Other than a few mishaps with the robot’s climbing mechanism in the first few qualifying matches, Shama said that the robot worked according to plan. However, he said that a difficult schedule of matches may have lowered the team’s seed from third to fourth for alliance selection. Since the team was placed in several difficult match-ups during the qualifying games, they were unable to win nearly as many games and as a result placed lower.

However, the team still qualified for Houston. This year also marks the first time in the club’s history that both the FRC and the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) teams are going to a world championship. FTC is a robotics competition with smaller dimensions than FRC. The Cuttlefish FTC team will accompany the FRC Fish to Houston.

The club has organized the transportation of approximately 20 key FRC members to the Houston competition in addition to the drive team consisting of seniors Ankur Garg, Graham Kingston, Ian Le, and Valen Yamamoto. In total, the Saratoga High Robotics group is expected to send about 40 students.