Monrovia High Robotics Team Advances to World Championship

The Kings and Queens at the end of a match with their partner The Zorrobots from Ensenada, Mexico. – Courtesy Photo

Monrovia High School’s “Kings And Queens” robotics team one of only 128 teams out of 3,900
around the world to qualify for the 2015 FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics World Championship.

The ten Monrovia High School students of the “Kings and Queens” robotics team and their purple robot “Sir Lancelot” qualified to advance to the 2015 FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics World Championships for a second year in a row as a result of their excellent performance at the West Super-Regional Robotics Tournament held in Oakland this past weekend. The three-day tournament brought together the 72 top teams who were winners of state and regional competitions from 13 western states. The Monrovia team is one of four qualifiers from the Los Angeles area who will be among the 128 top teams from around the world to compete at the World Championships which will be held at the historic Union Station in St. Louis April 22-25. Only 35 U.S. teams who competed in last year’s World Championship have earned the right to come back again this year.

The Kings and Queens team (four seniors, one sophomore and five freshmen) designed and built their own 18 x 18 inch robot from t-slot channel, Plexiglas, and formed aluminum to compete in the annual FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics competition. Each year FTC creates a new game challenge and teams build a new robot to accomplish the requirements of that season’s game. The challenge this season is to gather up hollow “wiffle” baseballs and golf balls from the playing field and fill goals made of vertical plastic tubes up to four feet high while never touching the tubes themselves. The matches pit randomly paired teams of two robots against one another on a 12-ft by 12-ft field where they try to score as many balls as possible in 2 1/2 minutes. The Kings and Queens are well known in the FTC community for their driving skill, unique robot designs, their signature costumes of purple velvet gold-embroidered renaissance dresses and gold tiaras for the girls and fur-trimmed black velvet jerkins with purple capes and gold crowns for the boys, and their supporter’s cheer of Huzzah! every time they score points.

The Kings and Queen’s robot “Sir Lancelot.” – Courtesy Photo

The Kings and Queens got off to a rocky start in this weekend’s competition, losing 4 of their first 5 matches due to mechanical problems including the failure of a critical servo mechanism that caused the robot to veer off the 12-inch high starting ramp and topple over onto the playing field on its side. At that point they had fallen to a rank of 34 out of the 36 teams in their division. Team captain Melissa Johnson says the team has to take such things in stride: “At this point in the season things start to wear out and you have to be prepared to do repairs on the spot. Falling off the ramp, though, was something we never expected.” After making repairs and replacing failed parts the team went back to work and decisively won their final four matches in a row to finish the tournament ranked a respectable 14th with a 5-4 record.

In addition to the on-field competition, FTC teams also compete for awards given out by a panel of judges made up of engineers, computer scientists and technical professionals. The Kings and Queens were nominated for the FTC Design Award which is given for unique and elegant robot design. The judges were especially impressed by the “hopper” the team created to hold the balls while they are lifted up to the goals. Early in the season, the team fabricated the hopper by sawing and carving a wood form to the desired shape, heating PETG plastic sheet in an oven until it was pliable, and then forming the softened plastic over the wooden pattern. It took six cycles of heating and forming to create the desired shape.

Winning the award was a surprise, said four-year team member Amanda Sullivan. “The teams that make it this far are very, very good and have very impressive robots. We knew we did some things differently than other teams, and the judges must have liked that.” The highpoint of the weekend was when the award winners were announced, according to first-year team member Roberto Orozco, “When they showed the nominee on the screen and it was us, we were kind of stunned. Then our coach stood up to yell our traditional Huzzah! but he didn’t realize he had lost his voice from yelling for us all day and instead of a yell it came out like a cross between Mickey Mouse and Kermit the Frog and everyone started laughing.”

This marks the second trip in a row to the world championships for Monrovia High School’s five-year-old FTC robotics program which fields five separate student robotics teams supported by company sponsors, the community, and parents, and is led by physics teacher Tom Dobson. The success of the Kings And Queens caps a strong year for Monrovia High which saw all five of the program’s teams qualify over the season to compete in the Los Angeles Regional Championship Tournament held in Monrovia in February. At the L.A. regional tournament the Kings And Queens team were a member of the second-place final alliance and were nominated as the second runner-up for the Inspire Award, the tournament’s highest award.

The Monrovia High FTC robotics after-school program is one of many opportunities at Monrovia High School supporting STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and math) in conjunction with Monrovia’s Math and Science Academy, and supported by the Monrovia Schools Foundation. The Monrovia High School FTC robotics program is actively seeking tax-deductible donations and company sponsorships to help cover the approximate $12,000 cost of taking the team to St. Louis. Donations may be made through the team’s GoFundMe page at http://www.gofundme.com/kingsandqueens2015.

The Kings and Queens team before the start of the FIRST Tech Challenge Super-Regional Robotics tournament in Oakland, CA. – Courtesy Photo