From their own basement to the World Competition: Big aspirations for Chesterton’s senior robotics squad

Patrick Mochen
Onwardtrojans.com

Many school nights, senior William Morgan goes to his basement to modify his robot. Along come seniors Ray Hundt, Keith Ward, and Mackenzie Kania and the team is ready to practice.
With Morgan and Hundt going on runs to get ready for track season and Ward getting ready for volleyball, it can be difficult for any of them to go to an after-school robotics practice. Luckily for them, they can practice at their own convenience at the Morgan household, where a robotics arena is staged in the basement. The Trojans are preparing for the state competition, and are hoping that they can qualify for Worlds.
“We first started having practice at my house last year,” Morgan said. “These practices have been super helpful because of how flexible they are. Because the robot is only a trip to the basement away it is easy to go down to work on it a little when I have free time.”
Teams earn points in robotics by grabbing plastic balls and placing them into tubes. In order to gain the most points, a robot must be able to drive reliably, take the balls, and spit them back out. Competitions involve an "autonomous period”, where the robot must drive by itself, and a driver control portion, where one team member operates with a controller.
Morgan builds the robot that they use for competition.
“On our robot alone I have probably spent upwards of 200 hours doing everything this season,” Morgan said.
The current robot he built has six motors on the drive train, three controlling the left wheels and three controlling the right. Another motor controls the intake and the last motor controls the output. Teams are limited to eight motors. Morgan said they have built two different robots throughout the year, which surprisingly is less than in past years. Making repairs or changes to the robot can be so tedious that oftentimes the team will redesign the whole thing.
Ward operates the robot during the driving section. Ward drives the robot somewhat wildly, whipping it around the arena and banging into the walls as it goes. He drives so fast that they often have to give the robot a break to let the motors cool down.
Hundt writes the code the robot runs on during the “autonomous period”. Using C++ programming language, he instructs the robot how to move. The robot is equipped with two sensors, one that tracks how far it moves forward and backward, like an odometer on a car, and another that tracks the rotation, like a compass. Hundt gives the robot specific instructions on how far to move and rotate, which must be tweaked to fine detail, or else the robot will be wildly off the mark. Anytime Morgan makes an adjustment to the robot, Hundt must modify his code to operate well with the new parts.
“Pretty much everything electronic is custom coded so coding is an integral part of a team’s success,” Morgan said.
Kania keeps records in the engineering notebook which has a breakdown of everything they build and do.
“It’s probably 90 pages long,” Ward said of Kania’s notebook. “One of the major awards is the Excellence Award, and the notebook is a big criteria for it.”
Building up in the rankings throughout the rest of the season is important, as climbing the world rankings will help them qualify for the world competition, which is in May. The team believes that they have a chance of getting to the world competition through the skills category.