Veteran robotics team qualifies to Worlds after regional tournament

courtesy of Elliot Shem

Playing on the same alliance during one of their matches, the MSET Cuttlefish and Bettafish race to stack blue cones on poles stationed around the field.

After months of preparation, two of the school’s FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) teams qualified and competed at the FTC Northern California Regional Championship over the weekend of March 4 at Kathleen MacDonalds High School. 

Only 48 teams in NorCal were invited to the two-day regional tournament based on performance at previous qualifiers; of those 48, five teams — including one from Saratoga High — will advance to the prestigious FIRST Championship in Houston from April 18 to 22. 

While the Cuttlefish have advanced to the Worlds’ Championships, the school’s FIRST Robotics Challenge’s (FRC) robotics team, 649 MSET Fish are competing on the weekend of March 18 at the FIRST Robotics San Francisco Regionals (with an additional competition on April 7) for their chance at qualifying for the FIRST Championship. (Results of the March 18 competition weren’t available because of printing deadlines.)

This year, the three-team robot game alliance and Inspire Award runner-ups advanced to the FIRST Championships. The Inspire Award is awarded to the team judges best feel is a strong ambassador for FIRST programs and a role model FIRST team. 

6165 MSET Cuttlefish

The 6165 MSET Cuttlefish, the school’s flagship FTC team, had high hopes for both the robot game and award selection after organizing various outreach initiatives throughout the year and continuously iterating and improving on parts of their robot. 

Senior software lead Matthew Song said a series of unforeseeable factors led to a disappointing performance at the competition. Song mostly works on the autonomous section of the robot, a 30-second period where robots operate using only pre-programmed instructions and sensor inputs. 

“Though [our autonomous] was working pretty well a few weeks before the competition, it was very inconsistent at regionals,” Song said. “The main issue was the practice field at our school is very old, and the robot was not tuned for newer fields like the ones at regionals.” 

Song also mentioned that because their field tiles were older, it was much squisher — which allowed the robot to move faster than if it were on a firmer field. Because firmer tiles cannot hold the robot in as easily, the robot often slipped on the fields at regionals, causing it to deviate from its original path. 

Despite issues with their autonomous period, junior hardware member and driver Naomi Hsieh was confident to make it into Division finals with their alliance partners 8872 Robopocalypse and 11311 Paragon. By the time the team had reached the semi-finals, the autonomous period had been adjusted to fit the new field. Hsieh felt confident the driver-controlled period would be fine, given all the practices they’ve had. 

But an unexpected defeat happened. They had lost 226-224 due to what Hsieh believed to be a misscoring by one of the scorekeepers, costing them 20 crucial points. 

The next match, the team was rotated off for team 11311 Paragon to compete for their alliance. As the second match continued, Hsieh and her teammates lost hope as the match continued to move toward what seemed to be a decisive loss. As unexpected as the first match, Hsieh and her team looked up with disbelief — their alliance partners had won the match due to a massive 80 points of penalties incurred by the opposing alliance. 

“It was really a miracle,” Hsieh said. “We were all super surprised”

The team went on to win the third match and headed off to division finals where they lost 2-0.

Despite the loss, their hard work paid off as they were awarded the Inspire 2nd Place Award, placing them second in the advancement slot to Houston.

To prepare for the FIRST Championship, the team plans to do more driver practice and develop game strategies as they go. In addition, the team hopes to retune their autonomous software to fit a firmer field, introduce new sensors to help with their autonomous and adjust select hardware modules for a more efficient robot.

Although the team was disappointed at their performance in the robot game, Song was happy to have had this opportunity to meet new friends from other teams.

“I think one unique part about FIRST is that we’re able to talk to all these other teams and make friends with them,” Song said. “We have friends from Santa Clara High School, San Ramon, Palo Alto and even as far as Folsom. It was a really great experience and I hope we can improve a lot for Worlds.”  

7641 MSET Bettafish

For the rookie Bettafish team, the regional competition was a learning experience in terms of the  robot building, engineering portfolio, as well as students’ presentation and interview skills.

Though the Bettafish were eliminated in their third playoff match, they found their performance to exceed what they had expected. The drivers — freshman Lucius Ko, Willis Chung and Florence Hu — performed extremely well, and much to their team’s expectations.
“Our drivers stayed calm under pressure — something they practiced a lot for especially before regionals,” sophomore hardware lead Asheeka Noronha said. “They would even blast memes to practice keeping their focus during their many driver practice sessions, and it showed.”

As the day progressed, the Bettafish experienced both wins and losses, most of which were against the top teams in the region. Regardless of the results, the team continued to think ahead toward the next match and their potential strategies, rather than dwelling on losses. 

“When we finished a match, it always gave the drivers a few minutes of rest and relief, and I could always learn something from the gameplay of our opponents to apply in the next match,” Hu said.

During alliance selection, the Bettafish accepted an invitation to join the second-place team in their alliance. 

“We were confident we could make it to the finals, but our slides broke toward the end of qualification matches, and we weren’t sure if teams would be as inclined to pick us then,” Noronha said.

After their elimination from the robot game, the Bettafish began looking to the awards ceremony as their advancement to Worlds. However, the entire ceremony passed without them receiving any award. Despite this disappointment, they are now looking to learn from the gaps identified during Regionals and improve their outreach going into the offseason and next year.

“I feel great pride in what came out of this competition because the result is literally the embodiment of all the hard work we had accomplished over the season,” Ko said. “All of our hard work paid off for us to make it this far into the season as mostly rookies.”