This past weekend, the Hingham Hammerheads Robotics Team competed in the FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship in Houston, Texas. The weekend was a great culmination for all of the hard work put in by its members over the last few months, as their great success would break team records and also win an award.
The Hingham Hammerheads Robotics Team competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition, an international engineering challenge for passionate high school students. Every year a new game is announced, equipped with design, building, and programming challenges to create a single robot. In an interview with Harbor Media, code captain Tori Dell said “The build season takes place from January to May where we build one robot in which everyone works on (the robot) to compete.”
Build captain Logan de Laar added,”Early on we start with prototyping, then we slowly shift over to building the robot. With that, we must design the bot, then test it, and then code it.”
This year’s game, named Rebuilt, consisted of collecting dodge balls and shooting them into the central hub as accurately and frequently to maximize points. After many weeks of building, the Hammerheads developed their robot, Icarus. The robot’s performance propelled them to top finishes at their competitions at colleges URI, WPI, and the District Championship in Springfield, eventually earning them a spot at the World Championship in Houston.
This would prove to be the Hammerheads first invitation to the World Championship in team history since the team’s creation in 2014. Despite it being their first invitation, the team took it in stride.
The Hammerheads would be placed in one of the eight divisions, the Hopper Division, competing with teams all over the world. Although they were only given 10 qualification matches, they certainly made the most of it, as they ended with a record of 8 wins and 2 losses, ranking as the number 5 team out of 74.
Due to their high placement in their qualification matches, they were slated to be an Alliance Captain, meaning that they would choose two other teams to join their alliance for the playoff matches. This, again, was another very impressive achievement for a team’s first invitation. The Hammerheads ended up selecting team Mechanical Advantage from Littleton, Massachusetts and team Raider Robotics from Sacramento, California. Although their alliance lost two close matches in their double elimination tournament, it was still an amazing showing.
After their matches had concluded, the Hammerheads would not go home without any hardware, as they won the Creativity Award sponsored by Rockwell Automation for their unique mechanical design and their proprietary software developments.
Once the World Competition and season ended, the Hammerheads would be ranked 6 out of 200 teams in New England, 28 out of 2944 teams in the US, and 34 out of 3723 teams in the world. Although their remarkable season eventually had to come to and end, it will certainly live on as a season to remember for the Hammerheads.
