Fresh off last year’s success at the VEX Robotics World Championship, the Burros robotics team is gearing up to make a third appearance at the competition. They’ve been at work over the summer to create a bot adapted for this year’s new game.
“Basically the objective is to get more of your color cubes into the goals on the sides and middle of the arena,” explained varsity Lead Coder Will Horning. The cubes are collected from the floor and designated “loaders” in each corner of the arena.
“We’re building a combined mechanism to intake and drop the cubes into the tubes,” Horning said, “which should be more streamlined.” The team has already completed gyroscope testing for their base.
The team can also score extra points by parking their bot in a specific parking zone at the end of the match. However, the zones are blocked by guardrails that require extra navigation to traverse. “It’s oddly hard to make your body go over, and there’s a question of if it’s worth it to do it or not,” mused Horning, referring to the robot’s metal underbelly.
“We’re not doing parking zones because we think the time is not worth it when we would be using it to score more points,” said varsity Lead Builder Kevin Jones. The team has decided to focus on improving their cube intake mechanism instead to score points that way.
The team has their first competition on September 20th in Bakersfield. It will be the first opportunity to test the effectiveness of their cube-focused design. From there, they will continue iterating until they arrive at a championship-ready design.
“We’re going to worlds,” the team affirmed.
