Atascadero school robotics team headed to global championship. ‘We take this very seriously’
Atascadero High School’s robotics team, the Greybots, is headed to Houston next week to compete in a global youth robotics competition.
Along with luggage, the 19-person Greybots team is packing a 125-pound robot, named Wildfire.
Designed, built and coded by students, the robot has a mind of its own and can tear across the competition field autonomously.
The FIRST Championship is hosted in Houston, Texas, and runs Wednesday through Saturday. Although there are nearly 4,000 eligible youth robotics teams worldwide, only about 450 teams make it to this global competition.
“Only about 10% of teams worldwide make it to this level, so it’s a very high-level competition,” said Greybots team manager Brooke Halasey a 16-year-old junior at Atascadero High School.
The coronavirus pandemic shut down the FIRST Championship in 2020, and 2021 featured an at-home competition. The Greybots team took home the top prize in 2019.
“The last time there was a championship — we won,” Halasey said.
The team also won the FIRST Championship in 2011 and 2017, but this is the first time since the pandemic started that the teams will be competing in-person, according to Halasey and fellow team manager Charlotte Maples, an 18-year-old senior at the high school.
The hiatus means many members of the Greybots team have never competed at the global level before. Training some of the newer students was a bit challenging, the team managers said.
Despite these hurdles, Maples and Halasey said they feel confident going into the competition.
“As a team, a lot of it is our environment,” Maples said. “We created a much more driven and determined (environment).”
“We’re very serious,” Halasey added.
How does Atascadero High School team prepare for competition?
The youth robotics teams competing in the FIRST Championship compete in a different kind of robotics game every year.
In early January, that game is revealed to the youth robotics teams.
“That’s a pretty big day,” Halasey said. “We spend all day in shops, looking at ideas and just really researching what the game is about and what we want to accomplish.”
The team spends the next six weeks building the robot and programming it using code to teach it how to move on the field.
The 19 students are split into five sub-teams with different specialties: design, fabrication, assembly, programming and business/media.
They have six adult mentors, some of them former Greybots, who work in science, technology and engineering companies along the Central Coast.
Halasey and Maples estimated the mentors invest more than 40 hours a week helping the Greybots.
Competitors are tasked with building a robot that conforms to weight and size requirements that will impress the judges and crush the competition.
Since 2013, the Greybots have named their robots after natural disasters. Blackout competed in 2020 and Fireball was the champ in 2019, Maples said.
This year’s robot is called the Wildfire. It weighs 125 pounds — 140 pounds with the bumpers on.
“It’s our max weight, which allows us to be able to do defense and not get pushed around by the other robots, which is especially helpful,” Halasey said.
“If something breaks, it’ll be easily fixed, so it’s really robust,” she said. “I would say that pretty much describes our robot as a whole pretty well.”
When the competition season begins, team members participate in matches, talk to judges and tinker with their robot.
Judges award teams for accomplishments in innovation, engineering and more.
“They’ll ask questions about various processes of design, fabrication, assembly programming,” Halasey said. “They’ll ask us, ‘What do you want to tell us about your robot? What’s interesting? What do you guys specialize in?’ ”
FIRST Championship game requires robot to shoot baskets
This year, the Greybots competed in three robotics competitions before qualifying for the worldwide championship.
The team has won two awards already so far this year — the innovation and control award at the regional in Sacramento and the excellence in engineering award at the Central Valley competition, Maples said.
This year, the FIRST Championship game features a rapid react shooting game, the Greybots team managers said.
During the competition, there are a series of matches between different robotics teams. As the competition progresses, the teams are whittled down to a few qualifiers for the final match.
Each match lasts 2 minutes and 30 seconds, with a total of six robots on the field at a time, Maples said. There are three robots on each alliance.
The objective of this year’s game is to get a series of rubber balls into a 8-foot tall funnel in the center of the field called the upper hub.
“We have to build a robot that is going to complete that goal the most efficient way possible,” Halasey said.
The first 15 seconds of the game is an autonomous period in which the robot is coded to drive completely on its own without any human operators.
“During the first 15 seconds of the game, our robot is able to completely autonomously go across the field and collect five of those balls and shoot five,” Maples said.
This exceeds the capabilities of many of the other robots in the competition.
“I’d say that the average a team can do is shoot like two balls,” Maples said. “So far, we’re one of the few teams that are able to do that much in auto.”
According to Halasey, many of the Greybots team members see the robotics competition as a way to prepare for success in the professional world.
“Almost all the students on the team want to be engineers or in the STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) field in the future,” she said. “So we take this very seriously almost as a job. If we learn the skills now it’s gonna make it a lot easier later.”
How to support the Greybots
Building a robot and traveling to competitions is not cheap and fundraising has been slower this year than in previous years, the team managers said.
To raise money for travel costs, the Greybots are holding an online raffle with the chance to win a $500 Visa gift card.
As of April 14, the team had raised 81% of its $4,000 goal.
Supporters can enter the raffle at https://go.rallyup.com/team973greybots/Campaign/Details or donate on the team’s website at www.greybots.com.
This story was originally published April 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: The original version of the story misspelled the last name of the Greybots team manager, Brooke Halasey, and misstated her age. She is 16 years old.
