Robotics fights to qualify
News Editor Kelly Wisneski
January 26, 2012 • Kelly Wisneski
Filed under News, Top Stories
It’s just as time-consuming as a varsity sport, club
mentor Chuck Seabury says. Robotic, though, replaces
athletes with robots, balls with plastic pieces and hoops
with PVC goals.
Robotics team members juniors Justin Perez-Norwood,
Ian Cornelius and Jared Cohen and senior Erik
Leiterman and mentor Chuck Seabury spent the last
several weeks preparing for the VEX Robotics Tournament
this past Saturday, Dec. 10. The competition, a
qualifier for the VEX Robotics World Championship,
took place at CSUN from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
At the competition, teams were paired in competitive
alliances and led their robots to transport red and
blue blocks into 13 “goals” of varying heights.
The team and its robot placed 12th out of 70 teams.
Twelfth place is normally a qualifying rank for the
World Championship, but the top four teams ultimately
determine who will fill the remaining eight places.
Because the top teams selected lower-ranked teams
to join them in alliances in the World Championships,
the TOHS team will not advance.
“It’s a funny way of doing it, but it’s part of the philosophy
about working together,” Seabury said.
The team members attribute their ranking to difficulties
with their onboard processors after the second
match of the day. Ultimately, the team forfeited the
next two matches in order to install a new processor
and upload the necessary software.
They feel, however, that they have improved since
their November competition and may try to qualify
again at the next VEX competition on Feb. 18.
“We are more than confident in the mechanics,” Cohen
said. “However, we feel like we can work on the
technical side of it.”
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