Robotics subteam 62A members Miles Agus ’18, DJ Lesh ’18 and Cameron Schiller ’18 placed fifth at the VEX Robotics World Championships Championships in Louisville, KY.
Subteam 62A was the only school team out of four total to qualify for the event.
Six students from the robotics program traveled to Louisville for the competition to support the team.
In order to qualify for the tournament, the team had to place highly in various regional and state level competitions, according to Agus.
The team has been participating in competitions since the beginning of the school year.
“We have been very lucky to make the World Championships for the past three years, and this will be our last year competing, so hopefully we will do well,” Agus said. “We have been practicing a lot and scrimmaging a lot. It’s exciting. I think this year we are the most prepared that we have been in a long time, so hopefully that translates into what actually happens in matches.”
The robot that the team will be using to compete with at the World Championships is a more defensive model aimed at winning through superior strategy instead of specializing in stacking cones rapidly.
The team will attempt to makes the cones difficult to stack in order to prevent goals scored by the opposition, robotics coach Andrew Theiss said.
The tournament consists of two types of rounds qualifications and finals. Each round is played with teams of two on each side, and the objective is to stack cones and move large stacks of cones over obstacles, according to Theiss.
“The performance of the team this year is exceptional,” Theiss said. “With students ranging from 10th to 12th grade and [with] varying degrees of robotics experience, the overall game in robotics knowledge and technical ability greatly improved. It is not easy to qualify for state finals let alone world finals, but our team has done both.”
Throughout the course of the year, the school team has produced a total of 12 different robots for various competitions, according to Theiss.
On the team, Agus is in charge of coding and participates in some of the building of the robot.
Schiller completes the majority of the building and Lesh handles the logistics, according to Agus.