By: Eduardo Galindo-Aguilar
On February 27th, the Boba Bots attended their first competition, the Pinnacles Regional at Hollister High School, starting the season off rocky placing 34th out of the 35 teams. Despite the low placement, the team did not leave empty handed, winning the imagery award for their branding and imagery along with Boba Bots member, Sharon Zhang, winning the Dean’s List Finalist award at Pinnacles Regional, keeping the team’s spirits high. But, during their second competition, the East Bay Regional (EBR) at Berkeley High School, they rose up to the challenge and ended up placing 25th out of the 55 other teams at the regional, ending the season positively.
Earlier this year in January, the game “Reefscape” was released for teams to design and build robots for competition. “Reefscape” was an ocean themed competition where robots had to pick up coral and place them on posts or remove algae game pieces and place them elsewhere to score points.
With the new challenge released, the team went into building and collaborating together to complete their robot. The Bobabots consists of four departments: construction (designs and assembles the robot), electronics (wires the robot), programming (codes the robot), and the operations department (which handles the business, imagery, and publicity of the team). The four departments all collaborate in the weeks before their competition to make a unique robot best suited to their priorities.
After discussing, the team decided to opt for a robot that would prioritize scoring corals, a tube-like game piece and to achieve consistently in scoring. The Boba Bots only had seven weeks to prototype, build, and program a complete robot before their first competition, the Pinnacles Regional.
For the competition, the team traveled and stayed at a hotel for the duration of the event. At the competition, though, the team struggled with serious losses, only winning in two matches out of the twelve total they played in. As Jackson Behr, the team’s electronics lead, says, “I’d say our robot was Murphy’s Law. It broke down when it could, but our pit team was always there, always willing to help out.” Even with their losses, the team persevered and kept improving throughout the competition resulting in winning the final two matches.
By the end of the competition the team was proud of themselves. Ann Zhou, a member of driveteam as the operator for the robot, explains, “[At] Pinnacles, even though I guess we [didn’t] have a good score, it’s not necessarily accurate to how our team did because overall the consistency and energy at Pinnacles was really good. The robot scored consistently, aside [from] when it crashed and we had to get it fixed.”
After the competition the team regrouped and established what they would do with the little time left 4 weeks before their next competition. With this time the team improved with drive practice and focused on adding new mechanisms to improve their chances at EBR.
Zhou further explains, “[At] EBR, definitely a time to put a lot of our energy into practice. So in between those two competitions, we added a lot of new mechanisms to the robot to score more and east bay was kind of our time to test that and make sure that this worked, and they did.”
The hard work from the Boba Bots had paid off with the team placing much higher at 25th out of 55th and resulting in a positive win rate winning five matches of a total of nine which proved to be a great accomplishment by the team. Theo Nolan, the assistant programming lead for the team, says, “[At] EBR, we were consistent. By then we had had a little bit more drive practice and time to tune all the mechanisms to work smoothly. We scored a lot in every single game. We scored coral in every match or game pieces.” With this result during East Bay Regionals, the team ended the season on a high note.
