A Robot Built By Mistakes

By Beowulf Laughlin-Koch

In the beginning, our robotics team didn’t look like much from the outside. We were a group of inexperienced students crowded into a room that felt too small, surrounded by LEGOs and a seemingly simple challenge: to make a robot that can complete as many missions as possible in 2 minutes thirty seconds. We were competing in the FIRST Lego League, an event hosted by the FIRST organization for aspiring engineers and coders aiming to put their skills to the test in a simple and friendly environment. We had had a few years of FLL experience before this point, but we were hoping that we would actually stand a chance that robotic’s season.

 That was last year. 

Since then, our team has moved on from LEGOS. Due to many of our members graduating to high school, we unanimously decided we would graduate the whole team to the league above FLL: FIRST Tech Challenge. FTC is miles more complex than FLL – Instead of LEGOS, we use actual metal robotics parts. Instead of simple Scratch block coding, we use Java scripting. Instead of simple missions involving pushing buttons and pulling levers, we now only have one goal, but it’s much more difficult; we have to design a robot that can pick up wiffleballs, or “artifacts,” and launch them into a goal around 3 feet off the ground. 

We weren’t prepared for this shift. At all. So those early days of FTC were about learning how to walk before we run. Meetings were messy, progress was slow, and plans changed constantly. We learned basic skills the hard way – by failing over and over again. But each failure helped us in the next iteration of our robot. And each iteration got slowly and steadily better.

Perhaps our biggest failure was realized almost halfway through the competition season; the guide we were following was not going to cut it. We had started the year with a series of videos that would tell us exactly how to make our robot, however once we started to learn more about FTC, we realized the robot was far behind the competitive standards for the league. So we decided to stop following the videos, and instead fully improvised the rest of the robot. 

Unfortunately, at the point we strayed from the manual, it was too late. Most of the robot had been built, and to modify the robot to the point it would be viable would require us to take apart most of if not all of the build. So we kept adding to it, trying to find some way to steer the robot back onto the right path before it went too much further.

The practice competition came, and went. We performed about how we expected – badly. But in that experience, came new hope. We had seen other teams’ robots, and had began to understand how matches felt when they really mattered. At this point, we still had hope to save our robot, who by now had gained a name – Felix. Along with the robot, our team had gained a name: the Associated Documentationists. Which is still hard to say with a straight face, given that it was meant as a total joke when suggested.

From that competition, our team began to evolve for the better. Progress was made faster, ideas were discussed and improved rather than being rushed, and our robot looked better than it ever had. The chaos had slowly started turning into coordination. 

With the final competition, our team still feels underprepared. And we definitely are. Our robot is still breaking, our plans are still changing, and ever so often there will be that one idea that takes up the whole team meet and ends up having to be reverted. However, we’ve learned a lot of what the FTC league takes, what challenges it presents, and what changes we need to make as a team. And once this FTC season ends, and the summer inevitably passes, we’re going to begin a new year with FTC. And this time, we’ll be prepared.