Every year as winter approaches, there is one club that tends to shift into overdrive: the Robotics Club. Their members start to stay after school, eat dinner together, and leave past 7:00 p.m. This is when their coders type furiously, their engineers tinker and improve until their brains go haywire, and everyone is doing everything they can to prepare for their scrimmages.
WA has two robotics teams – The Phantom and Ghost teams. The Ghost team was the original robotics team, and Phantom was only created after a recent influx of members last year. Most new members were assigned to Phantom, creating a skill gap. However, the team has thoroughly improved since but remains overlooked.
The First Tech Challenge (FTC) season has started for the Phantom Robotics Team – one of the two robotics team divisions. The basic objective of the challenge is to take blocks and specimens and place them in certain containers using robots to score points. The amount of points scored depends on the difficulty of the container’s location, and the object type. There are a few twists, including changing blocks to specimens and climbing, where the robot has to ascend a ladder-like structure.
On Saturday, Nov. 23, the robotics team competed in its first scrimmage against four other teams including the host, Alumineers, a team from Dartmouth High School.
Despite a loss, according to members of the Phantom division, the team is still proud of their effort and is planning on improving their claw.
“The robot they took was simply a proof of concept and was not meant to actually function,” sophomore Phantom team captain Arnav Prabhudesai said.
They are not surprised by the results but see this as an opportunity to improve. Because of a wire disconnection, the claw malfunctioned and couldn’t move blocks and specimens. Despite the placing, members including sophomores Taylin Neild and Mahiro Jilesen predict they would have placed 3rd, if not for the error.
Unfortunately, the Auto period of the competitions, when there is no driver and the robot runs slowly on predetermined code, also did not go as planned. There was a misalignment issue with the robot, which resulted in suboptimal consequences.
However, they still excelled at the ascent aspect of the challenge, being the only team to climb two rungs of the ladder-like middle structure; the Phantom team reported doing much better than last year.
“We’re much further ahead at this point than last year. We already have a pretty finalized design […]. We’re much more on track to meet all of our goals than we were last year,” Prabhudesai said. “We were inexperienced […] but we learned from our mistakes, and we’re definitely on track now.”
He also mentioned the Phantom team’s goal of placing within the top 25% this year and receiving awards. But most importantly, they value seeing their hard work yielding improvements at the next scrimmage on Jan. 19 at Western New England University, and all other future scrimmages and competitions.
