Built to succeed Local student, teammates win top award at Tech Challenge

BY KRIS OLSON

Not every high school senior year ends with a crowning achievement or cherry on the proverbial sundae.

Thomas Davis of Marblehead knows he is one of the lucky ones, and he has a robot — and a bunch of super-talented classmates — to thank.

Davis recently returned from Houston, where on April 22 he and the rest of the Waring School’s varsity robotics team, Wolfpack Machina, won the Inspire Award, considered the top prize at the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championships.

The Houston event was a true world championship, with 192 teams from all over the world — the best of the best from among 7,000 teams that compete in FIRST Tech Challenge — arriving to put their high-tech creations to the test.

In the lead up to the actual competition, teams rented conference rooms where practice sessions ran late into the evening. Waring paired up with a South African team with which it had initially connected over email and put their robots through the paces before going out to dinner together, “which was so much fun,” Davis said.

Waring’s robot has a claw — team members disagree as to whether it’s technically on the “front” or “back” — that picks up cones and brings them up onto a plate. A claw from the top, moving freely with the help of sets of linear slides, then reaches down, and a spinning turret enables the cones to be placed where the team wants them.

The competition starts with a 30-second “autonomous period,” which was particularly important this year, Davis explained. If you fall behind in the autonomous period, it can be hard to catch up in the teleoperated (drivercontrolled) period, he said.

As it turned out, Waring had a winning strategy.

“Our robot could stay put and extend slides and take in cones and then score them from the same position, so we didn’t have to move at all, which was really great,” Davis said.

Thanks to the code one of his teammates, Kaden Cassidy, wrote, Waring’s robot could adapt to over 200,000 different permutations of the game, “which is just mind blowing — to me, at least, because I’m not a coder,” Davis said.

On the robot’s performance in the field of battle alone, Wolfpack Machina was crowned the winner of its division.

But the Inspire Award recognized not simply how well Waring’s robot performed its assigned task — picking up cones and placing them on top of poles — though, to be sure, it did so with great speed and precision.

Instead, Waring earned the award based as much for their efforts on the road to Houston — and their ability to explain those efforts in writing and in an interview once they landed in the Lone Star State.

In 1989, accomplished inventor Dean Kamen founded the international not-for-profit organization FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, hoping to foster interest in building STEM skills in students ages 4-18.

For the younger set, FIRST offers a Lego League, from which students can graduate to the Tech Challenge and then the Robotics Competition, which FIRST calls the “ultimate sport for the mind.”

Davis noted that it is not uncommon for competitors in the Robotics Competition to have six-figure budgets and 50-person teams, quadruple the size of Waring’s 12-member Tech Challenge team composed of 11 seniors, including Davis, and one junior.

True to the founder’s vision,

FIRST strongly encourages its member teams to engage in outreach efforts, and Waring was truly a standout in this respect.

One of Davis’ teammates, Amelia Wyler, brought the FIRST Lego League to Rwanda, establishing the country’s first 35 teams and hosting its national championship. Davis and his classmates boosted those efforts with fundraising back home.

In addition, another of Davis’ teammates, Chris Douglas, spearheaded the team’s partnership with the Everett

Public Schools, which now has five Lego League teams, one at each of its middle schools.

Another teammate, Charlie Pound, is the main liaison between Wolfpack Machina and a robotics enrichment program at Centerville Elementary School in Beverly.

“We’re trying to provide opportunities in robotics that are similar to the ones we’ve had — which is obviously quite a privilege — to kids who really wouldn’t get the chance otherwise because we’re just really amazed by the wonderful heights that the FIRST community has helped us rise to,” Davis said.

Davis does a bit of manufacturing for the team, turning parts fashioned using computer-aided design, or CAD, into “language” that the Computer Numerical Control machine of sponsor ShopBot Tools can understand so that it can cut them out properly.

But just as vital, if not more so, has been Davis’ connecting with the team’s mentors and organizing “design reviews” with FIRST alums and business or engineering professionals.

“They give us awesome highlevel feedback on our robot, which is fantastic,” Davis said.

Such efforts were incorporated into the judging for the Inspire Award.

Davis also connected with some “amazing companies” who generously funded both the construction and maintenance of Waring’s robot but its outreach efforts as well.

In addition to ShopBot, sponsors of Wolfpack Machina included Paytronix Systems, Marble Harbor Investment Counsel, E-space, Symbotic, IPG Photonics, Fresh, Vecna Robotics and Neurologic Performance Group.

Davis said it was difficult at first to ask business people for money, but it got progressively easier over time.

“I’ve become a lot better at writing emails,” he added.

Along with his newfound CAD ability, these are skills Davis will carry with him on his next adventure, the setting for which is still undetermined. Davis is waiting to see if he will be plucked off either of a couple college wait lists.

But which campus he sets foot on in the fall is almost a minor detail at this point, as there is one other lesson Davis has taken from his participation in the FIRST Tech Challenge.

“I don’t need to wait to get a college degree to start doing amazing things,” Davis said.