Robotics Team Wins National Championship!

After watching a robot competition, many people never consider how hard students work to create successful robots. They put numerous hours of work into building the robots. In early May, the FC Robotics team attended the Bots IQ State Finals then in mid-May, they attended the BotsIQ National Championship.

The team consists of Eddy Phelan-Vidal, a junior and the team leader and lead designer, seniors Adam Zimmerman, Aiden Dorneich, and Kevin Quinn as well as sophomore Jackson Hagler. The support team consisted of Krisztian Salvador, Ava McCaffery, Ben Aun, Riley Pucklus, Sam Kuhns, Alanna Sloss, Aiden Purcell, Keegan Scanlon, Lucy Rygelski, and Graeson Santucci. As a group they spent hundreds of manhours designing, building, and testing their robot. Aerotech Inc., a local engineering company, provided advice on the robot as well as machining parts for the team to use. Engineers from Aerotech had weekly virtual meetings to analyze, improve, and produce the pieces the students had created in programs such as CAD. The team used aluminum and titanium pieces they had designed and Aerotech had made to build the framework of their robot. They took electronics, motors, and other parts from a remote controlled car to run, move, and control their robot.

At the competition their robot, Knockback, won two gladiator style knockout rounds against Pine-Richland and Punxsutawney teams. They never lost a round, but forfeited their final two rounds due to damage their robot had received from the Punxsutawney battlebot. The team was able to repair their robot before the end of the competition and placed 17th out of 63 teams in the battle section of the competition. They earned second place in documentation

By Ian Wellman

for providing a 160+ page document which explained the design of the 15 pound robot. It focused on key steps such as research, design, testing, refinement and their use of electronics. They received a near perfect score for their elaborate documentation. Their two scores combined placed them in seventh overall.

During the national level competition on May 19 and May 20th, the Fox Chapel Robotics suffered a loss against Fort Zumwalt High School during round one of a double elimination tournament, placing them in a second bracket. The FC robotics team did not let their early loss weigh them down, as they quickly recovered and won the next nine rounds! They placed first in their bracket and successfully made it to finals, where they lost to Bedford Area High School, which had won every single round in the tournament. This loss placed them second overall in the tournament of 38 teams. However, they had the largest number of wins in the tournament!

Their incredible performance shows that the robotics team was able to fix the problems that were exposed at the statewide tournament and further improve their design. They worked hard to recover from a loss at states and an early loss at nationals, but managed to score incredibly high in both tournaments. If you have an interest in robotics or joining the robotics team, sign up during the fall club week. Way to go Foxes!