This past weekend, the HHS Robotics team, the Hammerheads, attended their first competition of the season at Reading High School. the Hammerheads came in 10th out of 40 teams. This was a great result, as the team is only in their second year and managed to better teams with far more experience than them.

The Hammerheads compete in FIRST Robotics. This is a program for high school students in which they have six weeks to create a robot that completes a certain task. The task changes each year, and the teams do not find out what it is until kickoff day. After kickoff each team has six weeks to design, program and build their robot. This year’s task was called Recycle Rush. This was a pretty complex setup with numerous rules, but here is the basic concept. During the two minute, thirty second matches, two alliances of three robotics teams work to obtain the most possible points. The first fifteen seconds of the match is an autonomous period; the robot is programmed to complete a task on its own, such as driving forward and trying to pick up a crate. For the remaining 2 minutes and fifteen seconds, the students are in control of the robot. During the match, some robots move gray plastic crates from their “landfill” zone at the center of the field to platforms where they tried to stack six at one time. At the same time, other robots try to carry large plastic trash cans from the edge of the field and place a pool noodle, “waste,” in them. Ideally, the trash cans would be placed on top of a large stack of gray totes for the maximum number of points. Rather than having a winner and loser in each match, the total number of points that each alliance earned during a match was factored into a scoring average which determined each team’s rank.

The competition at Reading was a three day event. On Friday, after school, some of the members of the team went up to Reading to set up the team pit, which is where the robot is stored and worked on in between matches, and check in for the competitions that began Saturday morning. After getting everything set up, and even getting a little bit of practice time in, the Hammerheads returned to Hingham.

Bright and early Saturday morning, the team arrived for qualification matches. These eighty matches lasted throughout all of Saturday and into Sunday morning. By the end of the day on Saturday, the Hammmerheads were ranked eighth. The team returned on Sunday for the remaining qualification matches, and by the end were ranked tenth. The top eight teams in the competition are able to select their alliances for the playoff matches that were on Sunday afternoon. Since the Hammerheads were tenth, they were not initially one of the teams that would be choosing an alliance. But then, as the first and second teams formed an alliance and the fourth and fifth teams formed alliances, the ninth and tenth teams moved up in their rankings, so the Hammerheads became one of the top eight. Their alliance then began competing in the playoffs. Unfortunately, the Hammerheads were among the four alliances that were eliminated in the first round of playoffs. This is not the end of road! The Hammerheads will be competing in another competition at Northeastern on the 28th of March; hopefully they can bring home another blue banner!