The Piedmont Robotics team traveled to Houston, Texas from April 15 to 19 to compete in the Robotics World championships. Following the qualification matches, the top eight ranked teams in each division picked two other teams to join their alliance; Piedmont was selected as the 2nd pick by the 5th alliance. However, they were eliminated in the third round as semifinalists. Piedmont won the excellence and engineering award in their division.
“After going through all 75 teams in our division, they recognized us as the winners for the excellence and engineering award,” junior Cassie Colby said.
They then finished third in the eliminations. The competition consists of around 50,000 people between kids, mentors, and volunteers.
The team had some notice troubles and challenges before the competition began.
“We redesigned our most complicated subsystem which is our end defect. We changed it a couple weeks before the world. We thought this would give us a big advantage during the competition,” Colby said.
“I’m sad we didn’t do better, the potential of our robot was there, however the team didn’t have adequate time to test and iterate on all of the changes that happened before worlds. We changed part of our design before the competition and that required a lot of hardware and software tuning,” junior Nate Welch said.
The team believed they had a strong robot capable of a deep run, but setbacks before Worlds held them back.
“Because we switched the type of intake our robot had a few weeks before the competition, it took a while to get things dialed in again. We had too many things to do and not enough time,” Welch said.
“It was just like a robot was a little bit too complicated for us and me didn’t have enough time to refine it before the competition so I think that was the trouble really was that we didn’t have a subs system that we were super comfortable with and that was really well designed so it was just difficult to work with even though everyone was doing their best and everyone thinking of creative solutions.” Colby said.
Members of the robotics team were not only proud of themselves, but also a community representing their school highly on the national stage.
“Our team is relatively young in the first community, so even being able to go to worlds is a privilege. We have established ourselves very well with many of the top teams in the world,” Welch said.
The biggest takeaway members got was the skills and tools they learned from this experience, travelling across the country to compete against the brightest and best minds in the world.
“I’ve gotten better at both hard and soft skills by not using robotics. I led one of the pit shifts, which is the team in charge of fixing the robot in between matches. It helped me practice my skills under pressure like time management and critical thinking.” Welch said.
