With another tough but exciting year ahead, All Hands on Tech (AHOT), a community based robotics team from Lake Oswego, is preparing for its fifth FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) season. Coming off the high of qualifying for Worlds last year, the team is entering this new season with experience and plenty of energy to take on whatever the new year presents to them.
FTC Robotics is a hands-on robotics competition for students in grades 7-12, in which teams design, build and program robots to perform tasks in new, annually-released games. This year, the season raised a new challenge to the bar: a shooter game. Robots must complete a 30-second autonomous period using pre-programmed code before student drivers take control in fast-paced two-on-two matches.
“I think a lot of the seniors are very excited about the new season because it’s a shooter game, and a lot of the people who were originally on the team started their year off with a shooter game,” said senior Karen Zhang, Project Manager for AHOT.
“It’s very different from past seasons, and it presents a very interesting challenge,” added senior Olivia Seow. “We haven’t had to mechanically shoot or throw things for five years now, so it’s definitely fun to explore new mechanisms.”
The new rule guidelines also added another layer of intensity, senior Olivia Cho explained: “We don’t get any extensions during our autonomous or TeleOP periods this year, which is a rule we haven’t had since Ultimate Goal.” Autonomous periods refer to a robot being fully coded beforehand and lasting 30 seconds without any driver interference, and TeleOP refers to the manual driving period when robots are permitted to interact with driver interference.
What makes AHOT stand out isn’t just purely their engineering skills but also their team culture. A dedicated team of five years now, their ability to adapt to these challenges presented in the game guidelines has carried them through tumultuous seasons, and their commitment goes far beyond what is expected of them in the classroom.
With a World Championship appearance already under their belt and a reputation for being one of Oregon’s most competitive FTC teams, it’s safe to say that AHOT is once again ready to take on this season with passion and skill.