Robot Wars | Leon Idelchik
Robot Wars
by Leon Idelchik
CCA was a School founded in the principle of discovering oneself and making the most of your high school life. Members of the CCA robotics team may be better than anyone else has truly embodied that principle, working tirelessly day in and day out in the pursuit of their goals. These goals including having students come together to use their robotics knowledge to help stop the robot invasion and maybe win a couple competitions in the meantime. Since their plans to save the world is top-secret for the moment we’re just going to talk about the competitions. Let’s just hope the matrix is a close illusion instead of a oh to close reality.
The CCA robotics team, the Aluminum Narwhals, or team 3128 a common custom for robotics teams all across the country to name themselves after a series of numbers making it easier to identify themselves from other teams, offers a variety of different activities and events for their members to get involved with. They offer workshops where students are free to work on their own designs and inventions and explore their creative freedom. In some of these workshops students are given specific tasks by their mentors, a kind of puzzle room situation where they have to solve a problem within a specific set of parameters. It is said to really help with their critical thinking and is excellent preparation for the main meat of what the team does. This meat of course being the national championship that all the members strive for. Today where going to go through the journey leading up to the world championship or the FIRST Championship. And like all good journeys we have to start somewhere and were better than the start. The FIRST championship is broken down into a couple phases the first of which being build season. Before the season starts. The rules and regulations for the upcoming competition will be laid out as well as what kind of event or activity will occur. From there what is known as build season starts. Kickoff or the beginning of build season starts in October. These are when the first meetings start and the aluminum narwhals start brainstorming. They try and use their extensive knowledge of robotics as a collective unit to develop a way
This year’s event was called the FIRST stronghold. The game is played by two alliances of three teams each, and involves breaching the opponent’s’ defenses, known as outer works, and capturing their tower by first firing “boulders” (small foam balls) at it and then surrounding or scaling the tower using rungs. Points are scored by crossing elements of the tower’s outer works, shooting boulders into the opposing tower’s five goals in order to lower the tower strength, and by surrounding and scaling the tower. To make a robot fit for the competition within a limited amount of time with minimal resources at their disposal. The members of the team put a whole ton of hours into their work for 3 hours every day after school the team Lowercase devotes their valuable time to one of their greatest passions. Then after a plan has been properly created the team gets to work program engineering, and good old-fashioned manual labor all go into the creation of the robot. A captain and vital member of the team christian says “ our robot is built like a tank, short stocky and with a lot of tricks up its sleeves. It has pneumatics, 2 speed drive low speed is about 6fps high is about 15fps, it has a moveable intake that picks up and spits out 10in dodgeballs, and last but not least a grappling hook and winch” This process takes months and lasts up until mid March where the where the local preliminaries occur. That is where the Narwhals brought their stuff.They placed 13th of over 40 different teams and earned a spot at the world championship in St.Louis and then moved on to the world championship where they are 35 out of the 70 teams that qualified. 35th out of over 1000 schools competing and only looking better every year.
If you want to see the video of the Aluminum Narwhals click the link below: