This year, the Winsor Robotics team hosted our second Bots n’ Tea Party scrimmage and attended two qualifiers! At our first Andover qualifier, 13620 won the Motivate Award and 20409 placed second overall, and the alliance with both 13620 and 20409 ended up third in final alliance matches!
The 2023-2024 FIRST Tech Challenge season’s challenge was CenterStage. Our robots scored points by placing pixels in patterns on a backboard. There were also many cool goal-scoring opportunities like hanging from a truss and launching a paper airplane past the field boundaries. Learn more about the CenterStage challenge in this video:
We were able to host our second Bots n’ Tea Party scrimmage at Winsor in December! We hosted eight FTC teams from Massachusetts and allowed teams to participate in practice matches before the official competition season began. The scrimmage was a great way to engage with the FTC community, and we hope to make it an annual tradition! We also hosted an interactive stand at the Cambridge Science Festival, where kids and families from the Boston area had the opportunity to drive our robots from past seasons.
We saw a lot of technical growth within both our teams, the Winsor Wildbots and Winsor Wirecats, during this year’s competition season! Our building teams refined mechanisms such as a revolute arm, 3D-printed claws, airplane launchers, a hanging mechanism, and a cascade lift. Our coding teams worked on object detection with OpenCV and AprilTags, arm kinematics, sensor technology, motor encoders, and odometry. Our business teams designed new merchandise, reached out to new sponsors, and updated our social media accounts and business cards.
We are planning on taking advantage of our extended post-season to teach technical skills to new members, plan outreach and learning events, and further develop our mechanisms and coding systems. Our building teams hosted CAD workshops and are brainstorming new mechanisms and refining existing systems. Our coding teams hosted workshops about the fundamentals of FTC coding, feedback loops, robot configurations and wiring. We plan to refine our autonomous and teleop code and use PID controllers for odometry. Our business teams are hosting a team field trip to the Boston Dynamics office and are planning a Gender Minority Event for other MA-based FTC teams.