Robot ready to take on the world

Robots might not be taking over the world, but the Asotin Robotics team is hoping theirs will take over the world championships.

Asotin High School juniors Aiden Weber, Rylan Holland and Tristan Hoffmann won the Excellence Award at the Washington State VEX Robotics Championship in Bellevue, Wash., on Sunday. The team will next compete in May at the world championship in Dallas against the top 1,000 robots from 50 different countries.

The award was given to the Asotin team — named Off the Chain — for how well they did in every aspect of the competition, which includes battling against other robots, solo skills, interviewing and journal creation.

The battle portion of the competition involves collecting goals and keeping them away from the other robots (much like the game Capture the Flag), placing rings on the goals and balancing on a podium 14 inches off the ground. The solo skills involve the robot completing various tasks without a driver, requiring the team to create code for the needed skills. The interview allows students to describe their robot, and the journal explains their engineering process.

The game for the competition changes every year, so the first step is to figure out what the robot needs to accomplish in the game. Then, it’s a matter of getting the parts and using them efficiently to create the robot with a limited amount of materials. The team’s coach, Tim Weber, has been coaching for five years. Tim Weber is Aiden Weber’s dad, and he funds the high school team team, as well as four middle school teams by applying for grants.

Aiden Weber likes the challenge of figuring out the game and how to get the robot to perform the necessary moves. “Also just playing around with it (the robot),” he said.

Then, the coding comes into play.

“We have the robot, now we got to make it work,” Holland said, which involves Holland coding the robot. As a kid, he used Legos to build robots, so he jumped at the chance to code the more advanced robot.

After the robot is coded, then the team does testing, rebuilding and recoding to make the robot work, a process that repeats itself several times.

Their current robot is the team’s second completed robot. The first robot had a latch that attached to the goals involved in the battle portion of the competition, but it stopped working. The team then decided to go with two lifts, including a forklift that worked more consistently. The arms use pneumatics, which pumps air in tubes to raise the arms of the robot.

When the team added “teeth” to the robot, two prongs to help with lifting, it made the robot look like a rodent so the team named the bot Rodent of Unusual Size, or ROUS, after the creature in “The Princess Bride.” The robot has competed in seven matches total, including the state competition.

At the competitions, Aiden Weber and Holland are the main drivers and Hoffmann is the scout. Scouting means that Hoffmann looks at other teams they might be facing and plans a strategy for how to compete against them. He also looks for teams they might want to partner with during playoffs.

“I know about everyone,” Hoffmann said. “It’s pretty fun when it’s our matches, I already know what the opponents have.”

The teams get to interact with each other and Hoffmann enjoys talking to different people. At the state competition, Tim Weber said the Asotin team faced teams like Bellevue, which has connections to Microsoft and SpaceX.

Aiden Weber said based on their last two trips to competitions, where they came in second, “We knew we had a decent bot.”

Holland also said he wasn’t surprised that they won the competition. “It took us until now to finally prove to ourselves that our bot was capable of beating everyone else,” he said.

Before the world championship, the robot might need some work like making the gears go fast, along with some repairs. “It’s like (the TV show) BattleBots, so the bot gets battered,” Aiden Weber said.

After the improvements and repairs are made, the robot and the team are ready to take on the world — or at least the VEX Robotics World Championships.

Brewster may be contacted at kbrewster@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2297.