Friday, February 20, 2009 By Brianna Armstrong and Karo Shaginyan
-
Advertising
(April 13, 2007) -- Clark’s robotics team, the Circuit Breakers, is currently competing with 79 other robots in Atlanta, Georgia. They missed their first match yesterday because the arm of the “Burd” was damaged in San Diego on Mar. 28 and stopped working in the latter half of the second match. And although yesterday was devoted to practice and qualifying matches, the team had only a small amount of time to prepare.
Compounding the damage, the Burd turned out to be slightly overweight—0.3 pounds, to be precise. Dropping morale was boosted however, when co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, told the team he’d keep an eye out for them.
Over 300 teams are competing in the Georgia Dome through tomorrow. The event is split into four individual regional competitions. The individual competitions are played on fields cleverly named Newton, Archimedes, Galileo and Curie; each of these competitions becomes the competing ground for approximately 80 robots. The winners of those four competitions are then moved to the Einstein field, where the national champions will be decided. The co-founders of FIRST robotics—Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and MIT professor Woodie Flowers—are expected to be at the event.
The Circuit Breakers have been declared the number four ranking team among the hundreds of robots that are competing in the FIRST robotics competition, according to chiefdelphi.com — the most popular Internet forum for FIRST competitors. This list was compiled by averaging the number of tubes that teams were able to stack per round and the average number of robots that teams were able to lift off of the ground at the end of each match. Also on chiefdelphi.com, Clark's team has been listed as one of the teams to "most watch out for" in Atlanta.
The team had not expected that their robot, The Burd, would go to the championship event this year; however, by winning the San Diego regional competition on March 24, the team was given an invitation to compete at the national level. The Burd's forte includes its ability to stack twice as many tubes as most other teams at the competition. Toward the end of the San Diego competition, as the drivers gained more practice, the Burd was able to stack as many as five tubes and was able to gain as many as 256 points. After a broken air valve impaired The Burd from being able to grip tubes for part of the elimination rounds, the problem was quickly repaired when the team took their first time-out during the Finals.
Senior Gevork Hovakimyan is optimistic about the Championship event. "Let's come back [from Atlanta] with our heads held high and with the gold medals hung around our necks," he said. The team has overcome numerous engineering obstacles this season; however, the inevitable financial cost of attending the Championship event was the most difficult. As soon as the team members arrived back at school on the night of March 24 and danced around the teachers' parking lot carrying a 5 foot by 3 foot blue banner indicating their first place rank at the end of the San Diego regional robotics competition, fundraising ideas were tossed around the room.
While the heavy first place trophies were being lifted off the bus and onto the tables located in the rear of the robotics room, the team members, with the help of mentor Harout Toptchyan, calculated the costs to exceed $20,000. The process of raising funds has been intense and has been possible through community car washes, restaurant donation nights and candy sales. On March 31, some team members even set up a booth at the farmers' market in Montrose, selling Team 696 buttons, water bottles, and tickets to drive VEX robots (miniature robots about the size of an RC car) for five minutes at a cost of $5.
The Robotics Club held a pep-rally Wednesday where prizes such as DVDs and Disneyland tickets were handed out to students on a random ticket drawing basis. The team has put much time and effort into getting this far—the furthest Clark has ever come in the FIRST competitions. Should the Circuit Breakers win their competitions today, they will advance onto the finals tomorrow.