Alluminators Shine at Regionals

The Alluminators, New Ulm Area’s FIRST robotics team, spent the last half of spring break at the Lake Superior Regional Competition in Duluth. They spent the long weekend with over 120 teams at the Duluth event and conference center (DECC) where they battled in the FIRST Power Up Challenge.

FIRST is an organization that leads programs to give students from ages 5 to 18 the opportunity to design robots, starting from legos to full sized machines, and has been doing so hosting competitions since 1992. The Alluminators formed in 2009 making this their 10th year of competing and since then have brought robotics to students from each of New Ulm’s high schools.

Students worked together to make a robot that could accomplish the power up challenge – the theme this year being an old fashioned video game. “The object was moving cubes, which were fabric covered milk crates, to control a high and low scale as well as moving them into a hole in the wall,” said senior Jacob Todd who is the president of the team and a long time member. “We learned about the game in early January when it was released globally, and we were given six weeks to build.”

FIRST releases the game every year at the same time so every team has a fair start. The only thing teams knew until January was that it was video game themed which was revealed in the fall.

There were a few different things teams could try to do, such as move cubes into scales either one or five feet high, move cubes into the portal or ‘hole in the wall’ at ground level, and attempt to climb a rung which was seven feet off of the ground. “We have to spend a week or two planning what we want to do; we also had to understand our limits and build what we thought we could build,” added Todd. One special part of this year’s design was adding thick bars for other robots to climb on, being that the standard rung was only a foot wide and scoring maximum points needed all three member robots to climb.

Each round was a three-on-three match where each alliance worked as a team to score as many points as possible. Whichever alliance won moved up in rankings and vice versa for the losing alliance. Each team had eight or nine qualification matches where the teams were randomized, so at some point throughout competition one would either work with or against nearly every team. At the end of the 93 rounds, the eight top ranked teams would become captains and select two other members of their choice to join them in playoffs. This year the alliance of teams from New London/Spicer, Frazee, and Woodbury took home the championship and moved on to the FIRST Championship in Detroit.

The team was very pleased with how much progress has been made over the last few years. Two years ago the robot didn’t even move and last year the Alluminators finished competition ranked 21st. The rankings this year didn’t really indicate the quality of the robot built, being placed 54th at the event. Todd said, “We would have liked to see a  higher rank, it was just sort of bad luck,” referring to the randomized alliances. “This was the best performing robot we’ve had in the last five years.”