Overlake's Robotics Team Rolls Onward in Competition

Over the weekend, the Overlake gym was transformed into a competition involving bots instead of balls; although there were items called "glyphs" involved.



Team 7330, representing Overlake in the FIRST Tech Challenge, competed against 14 other teams from the area.



"We strive to do well each year, but doing well in this competition is perhaps different than in other sporting events,” explains faculty coach, Brian Husted. “While the students may want to move on to the state or regional levels, I really want them to be able to accomplish the goals they set out at the beginning of the season for the robot to be able to do.”

Since school began, members of the robotics team have been working on creating a robot that can take on this year's challenge- called Relic Recovery. Essentially their goal is to work to get as many points for the team by manipulating the robot to achieve movements, like putting foam blocks (or glyphs) inside an open shelving structure called a cryptobox. “While they have made significant progress on their mechanism, there is still more work to do in development for their block grabber and lifting mechanism,” explains Husted.

In Saturday’s competition, Overlake’s team played in five matches, each time partnering with another alliance team. “Currently the students have focused their efforts developing a mechanism to quickly and efficiently stack the glyphs,” says Husted. “They feel that if they can accomplish this goal they will be a good alliance member for the interleague championships when alliances are chosen rather than assigned.”

A strategy that may be paying off as so far in the first competition, the team has earned four qualifying points. The qualifying points are cumulative and will be added into the points earned at the next two competitions to determine which teams move on to the state competition.

You can check out the next competition back here at Overlake’s gym on Sunday, December 3.

If you have activated your Vidigami account, click here for more photos from the competition.