On the 22nd and 23rd of March, Wilsonville’s robotics team faced off against teams from around the state at a robotics competition. The event was held at Wilsonville High School, where the team showcased their hard work and engineering skills with their robot. 

Prior to competing, the team has a short period of time to they develop their robot. “We have six weeks to build the robot before our first competition,” said senior Rubi Martin, the team’s integration lead. 

As integration lead, Martin is responsible for ensuring that the robot is transferred to all their subteams, including mechanical, electrical, and software. These teams work together on different portions of the robot to ensure it functions as intended and create a design representative of all members. 

Freshman Aarush Vegesna is a part of the mechanical subteam, building parts and ensuring the physical integrity of the robot. He stated, “We manufacture a bunch of material and we build a robot together.” During competition, Arush also acts as safety captain, ensuring the well-being of team members. 

Because they have such little time to get their design ready, it can be difficult to delegate that time between all subteams to make sure everything is completed. The majority of time spent with the robot is on design, mechanics, and electrical.

Martin continued, “That leaves the software and drive team not a whole lot of time to get the robot up and running as well as practice with the robot.” But, she believes this year the team did better at scheduling their time to make sure everything was complete. 

Planning is also necessary throughout the competition in case anything goes wrong. Each team has its own pit area, where they’re able to bring tools to fix and prepare their designs. 

Martin added, “We pack everything that we need to fix the robot, things that we may not use throughout the entire competition, but if something broke, we would need to have it.” 

On competition day, the robotics team participates in matches, each containing three parts. “It starts off with autonomous mode, where we program our robot, and it goes and does what we programmed it to do,” continued Martin.

After 30 seconds, they go into Teleoperation, or Teleop, where teams can control their robots and attempt to complete tasks. Finally, they go into Endgame for the last 20 seconds. Vegesna said, “That’s where we have to do one specific task for the entirety of that time.”

By Sunday morning, Wilsonville’s robotics team was ranked third in the competition, with the remainder of the day being qualifying matches. The team did their best, showing amazing technical skills and teamwork, leaving them as finalists.