The Westwood Robotics Club participated in the Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology (BEST) Robotics Competition on Oct. 24 at Westwood. Despite many challenges, the team won awards as well as advanced to the the state level.
The BEST Robotics Competition is an event in which teams in an area come together and compete in multiple categories. For example, in one section, each team builds a controllable robot within a 6-week time period to accomplish certain tasks in a robot match. the competition is judged based on an engineering notebook (30%), a marketing presentation (25%), a team exhibit and interviews (20%), spirit and sportsmanship (10%), and the robot’s performance (15%). Many of the students enjoyed this competition’s challenges, even including those new to BEST.
“I really like the BEST robotics competition because the competition is interesting yet very hard,” Avneesh Agarwal ‘19 said. “But, it was still a lot of fun, especially building the robot.”
At the competition, the team went to many robot game matches, while the marketing and exhibition teams presented their work to judges. Although not scoring any points during the first robot run, the team managed to do extremely well in the following rounds. In one nerve racking round, the robot disconnected from the controller four times, but the team was able to get it working and thus scored many points. Although the team was unable to progress onto the finals for the robot, their determination did not falter throughout the competition.
“Despite major setbacks during build season and during competition, we persevered,” Club President Govind Girish ‘16 said. “I think we did really well.”
At the end of the day, all of the team members gathered in the field house for the awards ceremony. The team came back with a huge success, winning the best exhibition award, the best marketing presentation award, and the best youtube video award.
“I felt like our team really deserved the awards,” James Joh ‘19 said. “All of our hard work and development had paid off.”
The team had succeeded will be heading off to the state competition in Dallas on Nov. 14.
