Robotics Club attends 'Garden State Rumble'

Competing in its first tournament of the new season, the Robotics Club attended the February 9 "Garden State Rumble".

By Julie Mokrzycki
Arrowhead Opinion Editor

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Facing numerous technical issues throughout the day, Robotics Club members finished 33rd and 39th out of the 41 teams that competed at The College of New Jersey's "Garden State Rumble."
"I think we did pretty good for the conditions we faced at the competition," said Pure Logic team member freshman Zach Cross. "We had some problems with the robot, and we worked around them the best we could."
This year's FIRST Tech Challenge "Quad Quandary" was set up for two alliances of two teams each to compete against one another on the field.
Robots had to score rings at the ground level, platform level, or on either a low or high pole.
Many teams sent representative to visit other teams and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the robots and prepare for the
pre-determined alliances.
Pure Logic team member sophomore Katrina Sabochick was one of these scouts. "It was really fun to see all the different designs of robots and to meet other people with the same interests," she said.
The Chaotic Logic team also faced difficulties, choosing to redesign their robot at the competition.
"We didn't really do that great; a lot of our things didn't work, but we did a lot of redesigning on the fly instead of going with a flawed design," said Chaotic Logic team member senior Eric Strom.
According to Strom the most unexpected part of the tournament was "us redesigning our robot in less than half an hour."
Like Strom, Chaotic Logic's team leader senior Rob Davide was impressed by his team's ability to redesign the robot in between matches.
According to Davide, his team's greatest accomplishment was "being able to reconfigure our robot in the middle of the competition."
For Chaotic Logic, the next four practices are going to be spent redesigning their robot.
This new design includes stripping the robot down to the chassis and utilizing a forklift design in order to better gather and score rings.
"Everything but the chassis is going to vanish," said Strom."We're really going to redesign our ring-gathering mechanism."
After the difficulties faced at the "Garden State Rumble," the Robotics Club is read to prepare for its next competition, which will be taking place on March 8 In Weatherly, Pennsylvania.
"We have another competition coming up," said Robotics Club advisor Justin Kreft. "We did such a good job considering the problems we faced, and were going to do a lot better at our next competition."