From Thursday, February 27 to Monday, March 3, Los Altos High School’s robotics team faced 50 California robotics teams at the Hueneme Port Regional, their first competition of the season. Despite coming off an impressive run last year — ranking 7th in California — the team did not end up making the elimination round, as they were unable to form an alliance with another team.

“There are tough decisions you have to make, especially because of the time crunch within the competition,” team Captain senior Raj Virginkar. “If your robot breaks, you have to decide –– do you want to stay on defense to be picked for elimination rounds, or do you want to keep trying to show your offense?”

The tournament was a “week one” competition — the first one the team had competed in one. Besides giving the team only seven days to code a robot, they were only allowed one test round before the tournament.

“We need to give the coders a lot more time,” team lead senior James Doyas said. “They didn’t have that for the competition, and it really showed.”

During the competition, the robot’s task was to lift PVC pipes called “coral” off the floor or from a station and score it onto the “reef” for points. It also had to take a ball called the “algae” off the reef and decide whether to score it into the nets above or a slot called the processor. The teams were under immense pressure to work against the clock as they tried to maximize their points.

Halfway through the obstacle course, the Robotics team realized that their robot was malfunctioning. The intake processor that picks up PVC pipes failed, as it was interfered with by the algae intake, causing their robot to fail to complete the coral task. 

The problem was the interference between the two intakes. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) advises against teams having mechanisms that rely on each other, and instead recommend having a channel between them to make them independent.

This year, the robotics team also has a large sophomore presence, with very few seniors. Though the competition was a first for a large chunk of the team, the new members pulled their weight — all programmers in the tournament were sophomores.

“We had a lot of experienced and knowledgeable seniors that graduated last year, so the team in general is just relatively younger and more inexperienced,” Robotics teacher Stephen Hine said. “It’s not a bad thing, it just makes things go a little slower.”

“I’m proud of all the sophomores and juniors who are learning these things super quickly,” Raj said. “These are skills that I took three years to learn, and they’re learning them right now and doing a great job.”

The team has decided to change their design approach for their next competition –– their last shot at advancing to FRC Championships. Taking a risk three weeks before their next competition, the Robotics will now work to make each mechanism independent. 

“We’re in a high risk high reward situation right now, where our main designer has decided that our current design has a lot of mechanical issues,” Hine said. “There’s a new simpler design that he wants to try, but we have to get it done fast.”

While they may have faced a setback at their first competition of the season, the Robotics team is determined to turn things around with a reworked design. As they prepare for their next competition, they remain focused on refining their strategy and making the necessary adjustments.