MSET competes at Silicon Valley Regional

The Mechanical Science and Engineering Team (M-SET), or commonly known as the robotics club, is competing at the Silicon Valley Regional of the FIRST Robotics Competition held at San Jose State on April 5-6.

This regional is widely considered the most competitive of those in the FIRST program. Particularly in this year, many renowned regional-winning teams from Northern and Southern California and two teams from Texas are attending.

“Despite the tough competition, I’m optimistic about the regional,” vice president junior Ivan France said. “We are within striking distance of some pretty high-scoring achievements.”

This year’s game, Ultimate Ascent, entails playing a modified version of frisbee golf. Two alliances of three different teams play two minute and 15 second matches where points are awarded for shooting frisbees into goals at different heights. For the first 15 seconds of the match, the robots use pre-programmed instructions to score frisbees. 

Afterwards, human players control their robot and continue to score. At the end of the match, they can attempt to win bonus points if their robot climbs a large steel pyramid by the ending buzzer. 

The tournament starts with each team playing qualification matches where alliances are randomly selected. By the end, teams are ranked by their performances with the top eight teams picking their alliance to advance into eliminations.

“We have been working on improving certain aspects of our design since the last competition,” said senior senior Todd Nguyen, M-SET’s vice president. “Progress has been slow, but I think we will do well again.”

Last month, M-SET advanced to the quarterfinals of the Central Valley Regional at Madera South High in Madera from March 2-3.

After 13 qualification matches, the team seeded 11th out of 38 teams from across the state and captained the 7th seed alliance.

“[Being an alliance captain for the second time] means [the team] is getting more consistent and the quality of our robots and level of competition is increasing,” said junior Mihir Iyer, another one of M-SET’s vice presidents. “It’s another big step for the club.”

M-SET ultimately allied with Edison High from Fresno and Richmond High from Richmond and lost in the quarterfinals.

“[Our opponents] had a really good alliance since one of their teams is a former world champion,” Iyer said. “It was a good game, but we did lose.”

From the start, the team faced numerous challenges, particularly in software.

“It turned out that the software [FIRST] gave us was not compatible with the field,” junior Alex Renda, a programmer, said. “We had to rewrite portions of our code moments before matches started.”

Due to the short six-week build season, the team opted to withhold their frisbee pickup mechanism for an extra week of testing and tweaking. Teams are allowed to build and bring an extra 30 pounds of custom parts to competition after the stop build day.

“I thought it was a pretty clear decision to [withhold the pickup],” France said. “I think it paid off pretty well.”