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The 2007 Season

Our 2007 'bot, Tom, before the NY regional

2007, our seventh year, was one of our busiest. We kicked off the year by hosting, once again, the Manhattan FIRST Lego League tournament -- a robotics competition geared toward middle-school students. Teams from all over Manhattan, and some visiting from other boroughs, competed in 2007's Nano Quest challenge.

In January, we learned 2007's FIRST Robotics challenge -- a game called "Rack and Roll," the objective of which was to hang colored vinyl pool tubes on a tall, swinging rack in the center of the field. Two alliances, each composed of three FIRST Robotics teams, competed against each other, trying to create rows and columns of tubes on the circular rack. The first 15 seconds of the game were purely autonomous. Robots, aligning themselves by vision systems, hung the game pieces on the rack on their own accord. Then followed a tele-operated period, during which robots were controlled by human team-members. In the last 15 seconds of the game, teams could score bonus points by having one or more alliance robots completely supported on top of another.

Our robot, lovingly called Tom, used large, aluminum ramps to score bonus points at the end of the match. The ramps, which began the game folded, would expand to be several feet long, with a long ramp on one side and a platform on the other. Several times, our team won our alliance points by having both other alliance robots supported over a foot above the ground. Tom also had a unique clock-like arm that could lift and score game pieces without interfering with the deployment mechanism of the folded ramps.

Our greatest challenge during the season was the absence of our team coach, who, due to illness, was unable to supervise our lab-time. Because of school regulations, we were not allowed to use the lab without his supervision. Cox and Co., one of our long-time sponsors, was generous enough to lend us space there, where most of our robot was constructed and tested.

We were very successful in competition that year, reaching the finals in the New York City Regional with the help of teams 375 and 56. We also won the Judges' Award in Trenton for our hardships during the build season. In addition, the design of our 2006 robot, Joshua, was included in the book FIRST Robotics: Behind the Design. We traveled to Atlanta and competed in the FIRST Championship Event, where we had the opportunity to see winning FIRST robots from all over the world.