Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy’s D’Penguineers: FIRST Robotics 2012 End of Build Season Release prepared by the DP Engineering Academy Public Relations and Event Reporting Team: Jeff Gau, Sepideh Parhami, Vy-Luan Huynh, Danielle Tisdale, Justin Morris, Phillip Hodgson, Parker Olson, & Chloe Warinner
For Dos Pueblos High School’s Team 1717, the concluding weekend of the FIRST Robotics season has traditionally been a race to complete the team’s 120-pound robot on time, and this year was no exception.
After a month and a half of intensive designing, machining and programming, the Lindsay Rose, dedicated to a teammate who died in a 2009 surfing accident, emerged at midnight Feb. 21. Each member of the team worked for hundreds of hours to meet the pressing deadline, asking their peers not how many hours they slept, but rather if they slept at all.
As the sixth week set in, the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy’s seniors packed up their sleeping bags and hunkered down in the Elings Center for Engineering Education, preparing for the final push to finish their machine. During Presidents’ Day weekend, the D’Penguineers spent more than 48 consecutive hours in the Raytheon Electrical Engineering Laboratory, assembling the last components of their robot to ensure its success in this year’s challenge.
The 2012 FIRST Robotics challenge, a basketball-inspired game dubbed Rebound Rumble, required the D’Penguineers to devise mechanisms to shoot foam balls into hoops, traverse a 4-inch-tall metal barrier, and balance on ramps in the middle of the field, all the while competing with opposing teams’ robots for points. Instead of planning to merely play the game, however, the D’Penguineers sought to dominate the game, spending five solid days brainstorming designs and techniques. From this melting pot of unrestricted and eccentric ideas, ranging from “we should build an octopus” to “we should pole vault over the bump,” brilliant strategies gradually emerged.
The final robot not only accomplishes all the basic functions that the game demands, but features unique ways of maximizing its alliance’s score with creativity and ease. At the moment, the D’Penguineers are keeping their design under wraps, and will unveil their creation at their first regional competition.
Now that the robot is complete, the D’Penguineers are looking forward to the upcoming competitions with enthusiastic anticipation. On March 14, Team 1717 will haul its robot to the Los Angeles Regional, where it will battle against 65 other teams. Three weeks later, the Lindsay Rose will pit itself against 41 other teams in the Central Valley Regional in Madera. Winning either of these regional competitions will secure the D’Penguineers a spot at FIRST nationals and a chance to claim the world championship title for the first time in DPEA history.
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— The Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy Public Relations & Event Reporting Team includes Jeff Gau, Phillip Hodgson, Vy-Luan Huynh, Justin Morris, Parker Olson, Sepideh Parhami, Danielle Tisdale and Chloe Warinner.