If you ask anyone on the ThunderTech Robotics team what the coolest feature of their latest robotic build is, they will tell you that it is more powerful than a Ford F-150.
And, for their efforts, this team of students with representatives from each grade at Thomas Haney Secondary School have won a prestigious award for building the robot for the First Robotics Competition, an international robotics competition that took place from Feb. 28 to March 2, in Victoria, B.C.
The game is new every year, and there are 200 pages of rules, which they have to abide by.
"And for every game, we have to build our own robot, reprogrammed," said Grade 12 student Daniil Batishchev. Although, he added, they are able to reuse parts from previous years.
The rules are released in January and they have two months to do everything.
"The main rule is you always work with other people. You can't actively damage other robots. It's not like a battle competition, it's cooperative," explained Batishchev.
Each year the types of tasks the robots have to be able to perform also change.
For this year's competition, explained Grade 10 student Logan Humeniuk, the robot had to be able to be able to complete two tasks. It had to be able to pick itself up off the ground and hang itself on a chain, and it had to be able to shoot foam rings – about 12 inches across – into an elevated target and place it into a slot on the wall.
The 130-pound machine the 14-member team named 'Cobra Chicken', a slang term for a Canada goose, took home the 2024 Innovation In Control Award at the competition.
The award was given to them because they had a system with multiple cameras on their robot with displays on the control board for aim.
"It's generally an award a more experienced team wins. Because we were competing against teams from California that had millions of dollars in funding that have done this for 20 or 30 years," said Matvey Okoneshnikov, a Grade 12 member of the team.
"So it was not typical for a first-year team to get an award for a control system," he explained.
Paige Wiens, Grade 9, was on the hardware team for the robot, and her specific job was working on the bumpers.
She had no experience when she joined the robotics group and learned a lot.
"I'm not normally a people person but the community is really nice, they're really helpful. I learned a lot about tools and working and stuff. I never really touched a drill before," she said.
Its power is what amazes Wiens most about the robot.
"It's got the power of a Ford F150, which is pretty cool, and like a Tesla Model X in such a small thing, which is really impressive," she said.
Before the competition, each robot is inspected to make sure the teams follow all the rules, including following the specific list of parts they were given to build their robots. Six robots compete on the field at a single time, trying to get the most points by completing the tasks. Matches last around two minutes each. Over the course of the event, there are around 200 to 300 matches, most being practice matches and then about 20 to 50 matches for the semi-finals and finals, explained Okoneshnikov.
During the competition, though, Wiens said, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. They had to cut down the robot and redo the entire layout, after the top half of their robot was completely shattered when it ran into the boards.
"It's our first year, we're not experienced yet. So, we didn't pay attention much to the actual size of the frame, so we kind of faced some problems with the weight of our bumpers and the size of our frame," explained Daniil Batishchev, a Grade 12 student on the team.
They had only two or three hours to fix the problems. They had to cut the frame of the robot and completely redo the bumpers of the robot.
"The bottom of the robot had to be rebuilt because it was too big. The middle of our robot, we broke two very expensive computers, burnt out a bunch of motors," and added Mat, the top of our robot was completely shattered by three other robots during the game.
Vincenzo Lombardi, Grade 11, drove the robot and lined up everything for picking up and shooting. He said he was definitely nervous, especially about getting fouls.
Because, he explained, if you bump a robot in the wrong area, it will be a point for the other team.
At one point he was cornered in another team's area and the team kept backing up their robot into the Cobra Chicken, which would make the Cobra Chicken hit their robot in that very spot, giving the team multiple points, until Lombardi was able to get out.
They did well, initially in the competition, explained Humeniuk. Things were working well after they sorted out the frame. Their robot, he said, was working reliably and they slowly climbed into third place.
"Compared to all the other first year robots, we had the most complete set of features and we were able to do every part of the game," explained Okoneshnikov.
They also had great alliance partners, or teams that are partnered up together for the game. Strategy is also a big part of the competition, in addition to how well the team communicated with each other, and how well they worked together and with other teams.
While they weren't great at shooting into the big target, they were really good at hanging on the chain, so they performed that task, with the other team in the alliance performed other tasks, noted Humeniuk. But, that was before their robot got destroyed.
"It's not necessarily about who has he best robot, it's who has the most reliable robot, who has the best strategy, who's good at working with others," said Mat.
They ended up finishing in 23rd place, out of 42 teams from around the world.
The team is more pumped than ever about next years competition. Even though Batishchev is graduating this year, he plans to return to Thomas Haney to mentor and help out.
The main thing about the competition, he noted, is not to win the competition, but the friends that you make. And, he added, their team is like a family.
