Robotics teams from across the region gathered their skills and their robots to face off in the Virginia Regional Robotics Competition, which was held in Richmond on March 18-20, Friday to Sunday. This was the very first year that the competition was held, and also the first year that the HHS Robotics club participated. They went up against 68 other teams, placing seventeenth and winning the Rookie Inspiration award for being the number one rookie out of twelve.

Freshman Trevor Cockburn joined the Robotics club because of his dad and because he thought that would be beneficial for his future.

“When I grow up, I want to be a programmer, for video games and stuff,” Cockburn said. “[My dad] thought this would be really good if you want to go into programming, because half of actually making the robot is programming.”

The competition consisted of two parts: the actual competition, where high school students used their robots to complete an assigned task, and the engineering challenge of building a robot. Each team participating received four crates containing the parts necessary to build the robot, called the “Kit of Parts,” and access to a video which detailed the task that the robot was to complete at the competition.

“There are no instructions provided to create the robot,” said Geoffrey Estes, the team mentor for the HHS Robotics club. “The team members have to rely on their problem solving skills to design and build the robot to complete the task.”

This year, students had to build a robot that would compete in a game called “Breakaway.” The game consisted of two groups of three teams. The robots would earn points by shooting regular soccer balls into goals set up on either end of a 27-by-54-foot field, which had ridges that the robots had to cross.

“From the time we open the crates, we have just 6 weeks to design, build and learn how to operate our creation,” Estes said. “Planning and adjusting plans is constant over those 6 weeks.”

The team consisted of about eight or ten people, and they had to do everything themselves, from the time they got the Kit of Parts, although they had some help form people from JMU. The members that went to the regional competition included Danail Rashid, Samantha Swayne, Khashyar Dashtypour, Trevor Cockburn, Bilal Ahmed, Zak Kraimeche, Howard Zou, Milo Nuncio, and Jon Ross.

“We had instructions on how to set up the wiring, but most of the time we just had to know ourselves. We had more experienced people, and they actually helped us and taught us how to make it,” Cockburn said. “For me, I learned a lot more making the robot than I would just seeing it in a classroom. It’s more hands-on.”

Some days, the team stayed up until seven o’clock working on the robot, which they named Robodino after a famous soccer player, and they worked on it on weekends and whenever they had time.

According the Cockburn, the hardest part of working on the robot was “the wiring or the programming. [The program] was new to everyone, no one knew it. No one from JMU really knew it.”

The robot had a wide range of motions, and consisted of two subsystems. The first was the system that allowed the robot to be controlled wirelessly, called the driver control system. The second system was the pneumatic kicking device, which used air pressure to allow the robot to kick a ball.

“We had our own 10 by 10 working space, and that was really, really crowded,” Cockburn said.

The team finished building the robot about a week before the competition.

“When we got there, we were a rookie team so we didn’t really know what to do, but the other teams helped us and they were really helpful,” Cockburn said.

The robot had to compete in matches against other teams, which were judged and would decide whether the team moved up or down in ranks.

“The judges would rank us based on how well we did,” Cockburn said.

The first day of the competition, Friday, HHS was tied with second place out of the 68 teams, but started going down to about fifteenth on Saturday.

“We ended up at seventeenth overall. That’s really good, out of sixty-eight teams,” Cockburn said. “When you have other teams being sponsored by Mercedes, by big car companies, and we’re just sponsored by JMU and a local company, I thought we did really well.”

To Cockburn, the most fun time out of the entire competition was hanging out with his friends.

“The whole time you’re hanging out with friends,” Cockburn said. “I mean, I’m a nerd. I’m just going to say it. I’m a nerd. And when we go to the competition, it’s a clan, a group of nerds. It’s really fun. It’s a group of nerds hanging out. And I’m not going to deny, it was fun.”