Prepare to take flight
The second season of robotics at CFHS has been kicked off
The Bomb-Botz prepare for their upcoming competition.
The Cannon Falls Bomb-botz are ready for flight. This year’s FIRST robotics was announced Saturday January 7th. At 8:00 a.m. the team left from the school in a bus to Red Wing where they watched the game reveal, started planning, and had some quality discussion with the Red Wing FRC team. This year’s competition is steampunk themed and has three different ways alliances of three random robots can score points to win. The team can shoot six-inch wiffle balls into two different goals, carry gears from the sidelines to the teams “airship”, and in the last 30 seconds a team can attempt to climb a rope for bonus points. The official game launch video can be found at http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/2017-broadcast.
The team after much (and occasionally loud) discussing, the team has decided to focus on moving gears and trying to climb the rope. Grant Schlichting, one of the team’s captains, is definitely disappointed that this year’s competition doesn’t involve flying a drone like he first anticipated. Despite the inaccuracy of his theory he stated “I am still very excited to tackle the problems like collecting the gears and especially climbing the rope, as it is as close to flying as we will get.”
In addition to the main functions of the robot this year that are controlled by a team member with a controller, extra points can also be gained through an autonomous period in the beginning of the match. Autonomous mode is a brief period of time where extra points are awarded for robot actions when the robot is not controlled by a human player but from programming only.
With a new year, more team members, and last year’s robot to practice on Evan Wildenberg , the software team captain, is hopeful for a highly effective autonomous mode. This year Evan has had time in the pre-season to try and train new members of the software team to code the robot to allow it to operate on its own and with a controller. “I have an actual team this year, I don’t have to do everything, I can delegate to my subordinates now,” commented Evan when asked about the expansion of the software team.
2017 is a new year and brings new challenges to the Cannon Falls Bomb-Botz. The team has spent several weeks planning and preparing so now that the season has started they can hit the ground running. Week one of six has been very productive and despite no use of drone technology the team is ready to fly into this year’s FIRST competition.
Quin2 Sabin is active in soccer, track, robotics, speech, and band. In his free time he enjoys playing the banjo, consuming edgy memes, and communism.
Ella Coyle is an eighth grade Torch writer. She enjoys playing basketball and piano.