Robotics Team Attends First Meet of the School Year
November 2, 2022
The La Salle team comes together to examine their robot after a match.
Junior Joel Maldonado Ruiz places the cones in their starting position during the match.
Freshman Keenan Geyer and freshman Mackenzie Barrera control their robot during the match, while junior and team captain Henry Cechini oversees.
The allied teams take their positions at their assigned substations as they prepare for a match.
The team prepares their robot before the next match begins.
La Salle’s robot 4511 attempts to secure a blue cone on the high junction.
“We’re kind of taking in lots of ideas and refining them down to get kind of the most basic, but also the most efficient, way of doing something,” Cechini said.
“It is a great community where everyone is trying to build each other to be better,” La Salle alum and team mentor Lukas Werner said. “We always will try to find the best solution for what we’re trying to achieve.”
Team members come together during an intermission to talk strategy and fix last-minute bugs.
Members from La Salle’s team come together to celebrate and congratulate each other on their victory of their high score of 129.
“We took home a lot of information from this, and we’ve gathered together a list of some main points that we need to change,” junior Roman Elliot said. “We’re going to work on that, try to get all of those notes and try to improve our robot in other ways that we come up with as well before the next meet.”
On Saturday, Oct. 29, La Salle’s robotics team traveled to Franklin High School to meet with other teams from across Portland to test their creations in an official scrimmage event, kicking off a year of competitions to come.
“The team really came together, worked out some big bugs, and showed a lot of improvement,” said robotics team supervisor and La Salle math teacher Mr. Chris Cozzoli. “And I think they’ve got a lot of potential.”
Referred to as “Meet 0,” this weekend’s meet served as an opportunity for teams to test their programs and the functionality of their robots, with the placements earned not officially going toward their team’s league scores and providing teams the chance to gauge what needs to be improved before the official meets begin later in the year.
“We might not have won all of our matches,” freshman Mackenzie Barrera said. “But we’re definitely working out a lot of bugs and having some really great talk sessions down there.”
La Salle’s team entered the practice event with their robot, 4511. The event itself consisted of each team placing their bots in a large ring on the floor and moving them by way of remote control in order to pick up a set of small plastic cones and place them on poles of varying heights that are worth specific points. The functionality of the bot is then observed by referees, who count up each point gathered during the activity to make up a team’s total score.
Ranking second place overall and obtaining a high score of 129, the team is “only 30 points away from the current world record,” La Salle alum and robotics team mentor Lukas Werner said. “And I think we’re going to be pretty close to beating that soon.”
The team’s overall improvement was both exemplified in the match and with their given score, junior Roman Elliot said. “I wasn’t expecting our team to actually do this,” he said. “Especially against a couple other teams out there [that] looked pretty strong.”
Following the close of the event, the team plans to use the data gathered during their match in order to create an improved robot for the next meet, hoping to obtain an even higher score.
“Today we got a game plan down and what we want to do,” junior and team captain Henry Cechini said. “And now we can just fine tune a robot to allow us to do better.”
Correction: Nov. 2, 2022
A previous version of this article referred to the team’s robot as “Maker Industries,” when that is the team’s name, not the robot’s.
Linda Inda • Nov 3, 2022 at 6:55 am
This is such a such a joy to hear! Congratulations, team ! Wonderful start!