by Annie Zhang, editor-in-chief
A select group of Tiger Robotics members will be competing in their first-ever FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) from April 6 – 9 in Houston.
“Perhap the easiest way to describe FIRST is to contrast it with BEST. In BEST, we have our whole team working, we get all the parts to us for the robot, so we don’t have to spend money on the robot itself. Then we produce this gigantic and extravagant booth that takes a long time, and then we have an entire marketing section,” Chief Engineer and junior Tianshu Huang said. “For FRC, it’s completely different. Our robot right now costs at least $2000.”
The team received a grant last August to help cover for the entry fee, as well as the basic parts and kits. Still, all additional items have to be paid by the team itself, and even a small piece of gear can cost over $100.
“This year, the theme was Medieval. So you have defenses in the middle of the field and two towers at the outer edge of the field, and there are goals at the end (the towers) that you have to get the balls into,” Robotics president and senior Ann Yue said. “Theoretically, if you want the most points, you want the robot to be able to pick up balls and throw them accurately into holes on the tower. You have to breach the defenses to even get to the goal and then there’s a part at the end where your robot can do pull-ups.”
However, the team only has six weeks to build, and from February 23rd on, the robot has been locked inside a bag, with a sheet documenting all the dates and reasons for opening the bag past that date.
“In those six weeks, we designed it and built it as fast as we could. As you go along, we would sometimes realize we had two parts in the same place at the same time,” Huang said. “We also had issues with the gear box, where someone had put the gear in backwards.”
According to Yue and Huang, the robot is fast and powerful, even cracking a tile once. A 360-degree camera mounted on the motor allows the team to remotely operate the robot.
“Our strategy, since we’re a rookie team, is to grab balls, cross the defenses with giant wheels and go back and get more. We’ll let the other people in our alliance — who actually know what they’re doing — score,” Huang said.
Still, the team has plans to continue participating in the FRC in future years.
“We’re absolutely going to do this again,” Huang said. “It’s really fun; it’s real engineering.”
