Menlo robotics receives more accolades at latest competition

Lauren Yang | Staff Reporter

On April 18th, the Menlo School Botball team participated in the Northern California Regional Botball Tournament and won the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) award and the 1st place Alliance award. The KISS award is given to teams that have built simple yet effective robots and the Alliance award is given to the two top scoring teams in the alliance bracket. The alliance bracket is the bracket that teams enter once they are eliminated from the main double elimination bracket.

Team members included sophomore co-captain Lauren Yang; freshman co-captain Tommy Yang; sophomores Niky Arora, Mina Mahmood, Aaron Brown, Clare Cho, Claire McFarland, Mikayla Stabile, Lauren Chan, and Rebecca Ma; and freshmen Will Abbott and John Weingart.

Botball is a completely autonomous robotics competition that is played on a field where two robots try to score as many points as possible by completing various tasks. Unlike other robotics competitions which are not autonomous, Botball has no driver controlled period. This means that the robot must complete tasks without input from any human during the match.

This year’s tasks featured sorting pom poms by color and dropping various objects into an elevated goal. Participants use the iRobot Create base, which is very similar to the Roomba vacuum cleaner, as the base of one robot. To construct their two robots, teams can also use motors, metal parts, various LEGO pieces, and servos, which are mechanisms that can accurately turn to a position within an 180 degree range. Because the robots are completely autonomous, teams have to utilize sensors to accurately navigate the field. Sensors are devices that measure various aspects of the surrounding environment; they are useful because they allow the robot to respond to any changes that the sensors detect.

A strong sense of teamwork contributed to the team’s success. “Everyone’s motivation and interest in robotics led to a successful team in which everybody communicated and worked well together,” Arora said. Members who have not had any previous exposure to robotics also seemed to learn a lot. “[Some of] the newer members got to work on the robot and learned a few things about basic building principles,” Tommy Yang said.

With the closure of this year’s Botball season, the team is looking forward to another year of robotics.