In The News: Two robotics teams advance to super qualifiers

Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic

NHS — Team Aeterna's alliance wins Capital League Championship, with Team Bulletproof also advancing

SALEM — The Newberg High School robotics program is taking a different route to the FIRST Tech Challenge Oregon Championship, but Team Aeterna and Team Bulletproof are on their way back to the state competition after making the finals at the Capital League Championships Jan. 16 at Crossler Middle School.

Instead of entering or hosting qualifying tournaments in order to earn a spot at Benson Polytechnic High School Feb. 27-28, Newberg instead sent its teams to league play, participating in five bi-weekly meets before finishing with a championship meet.

Aeterna partnered with the Mechanicougs of Canby High School to defeat Bulletproof and alliance partner Circuit Boardum of Sprague High School 2-0 in a best-of-three series in the finals, but both advanced to the SuperQualifying round Feb. 13-14 in Hillsboro.

From there, both teams will have a chance to advance to the Oregon Championship, as they did a year ago.

Aeterna ranked third in the league and Bulletproof sixth entering the finals and both teams appreciated the increased in-game experience that the league format provided, with matches beginning in October.

The drawback was having less time to work on the design and construction of their bots, but league play also allowed for more time to scout opponents, even though everyone entered pretty basic machines at the first league meet.

“You kind of moved along with everyone,” Aeterna member Morgan Shine said. “You could see if what they were doing was working and if what you were doing wasn’t, maybe you could change it. It really gave us a lot of in-game practice that we wouldn’t always get around here.”

After ranking second in the regular season, the Mechanicougs finished as the No. 1 team in qualifying at the league finals and, having successfully partnered with Aeterna during the final league meet, chose them again to form an alliance.

The teams proved to be a good compliment to each other, as Aeterna excelled in scoring by collecting and depositing debris in bins, while the Mechanicougs were consistently able to climb of the “mountain” obstacle and hang from its top rung during the final phase of play, earning 80 points.

“A lot of robots you see just flipped over on the ground at the end of the match,” Shine said.

The combination of both scoring methods proved to be formidable as the alliance swept its semifinal 2-0 before dispatching Bulletproof and Circuit Boardum by the same score in the championship round.

In addition to earning honors for being on the winning and second-place alliances, both teams earned other accolades, with Aeterna receiving the Innovate Award and Bulletproof the Connect Award.

“We were having some troubles during qualifying, but thankfully we were chosen by Circuit Boardum,” Bulletproof programmer Sterling Eide said. “Once we got into the semifinals, we really started doing well.”

Since the league championship Aeterna has been working to improve its bot by adding a swivel to the bucket it deploys to collect and deposit bricks.

On the Bulletproof side, Eide spent most of Friday working to improve the performance of their machine during autonomous mode.

The Bulletproof robot features wheels that resemble sprockets or gears, which allow it to easily climb up on the lower bars of the mountain and position itself for the high-scoring hang maneuver. The team is also considering an addition that will flip a lever atop the mountain and score additional points during the end-game phase.

“It’s been about 50-50 whether we get the hang,” Eide said. “We usually get up to the high zone on the mountain to score 40 points.”