robotalliance

The robotics team took home first place at their first match of the year.

more difficult for other bots to go through. Teams picked different bots to ally with to increase their chances of winning. Because of its great defensive skills, the first alliance picked Blenderbot as their defensive robot. This alliance won the game, making Blenderbot one of the victor robots. This was an exciting win for the Raiders, as the underclassmen were the ones who built and maneuvered Blenderbot on their own.

Right after facing a match against other robots, seniors Naomi Liberman and Joshua Buttrick performed the excruciating task of lifting the heavy robot, Candis, safely onto its cart at Pirate’s Pillage, an off-season competition held on Sept. 24.

“We were the ones that built it, and we were the ones that fixed it up each time anytime something happened,” sophomore Olivia Takahashi said. Since this was an off-season competition, it also gave many underclassmen and new members a taste of what competing felt like. “It is an opportunity for new kids to get involved and see what the competitions are like,” sponsor David Ellich said. Although Candis did not win first place in this competition, the Robotics team was still quite thrilled with the results, since they demonstrated their ambition and desire to keep going, no matter the outcome. “It was a testament to the perseverance of our students and the fact that they never gave up, and that even with a ‘lesser’ robot, they were able to do very well,” McCarthy said.

“The robot was really heavy, so lifting it was really tiring, mainly after lifting the robot before and after every match,” Liberman said. Candis was a strong robot that could easily overcome all the challenges presented at competitions. In this particular contest, each team’s main robot performed difficult duties like collecting balls and shooting them into different baskets, as well as climbing rungs. Although Candis could flawlessly perform all these tasks, the robot that claimed the Raiders’ victory was actually their smaller defense bot, Blenderbot.

“Our premier robot could climb, shoot, and climb the rungs. Our defensive bot, the Blenderbot, was the one who pushed everybody out of the way,” sponsor Yoly McCarthy said. Smaller robots, like Blenderbot, were allowed to defend their team by making it

Story by Andrea Malpica

The first Roboticon competition set the tone for the upcoming season.

The Robotics team claimed second place and Judge’s Award at their first Roboticon competition of the year, held from Oct. 7-9. It was another thrilling event for the Raiders, since their robot was able to successfully perform every single task it needed to undertake, a drastic improvement from last year’s season. “Based on how Roboticon went, I believe that we are going to perform really well this upcoming season. We know what we have to do to improve from last year, and we have already started implementing those changes. I am very optimistic,” senior Naomi Liberman said. Photo by Yoly McCarthy

Programmers used Java to control the robots.

Junior Daniel Hagenlocker used Java to program the team’s robots. He followed a detailed process in order to code successfully. “You really have to break down the process into digestible steps,” Hagenlocker said. After working with his team, he debugged the errors and made sure everything worked correctly, so the robot was ready to perform its tasks. “The most exciting part about coding is when everything finally comes together, so you get to do pretty cool stuff with it,” Hagenlocker said.