FIRST Robotics Team 1816, “The Green Machine,” entered the 2023-2024 “Crescendo” season with ambitious goals: to become Alliance Captains at the Minnesota Granite City and Lake Superior Regional; to strengthen FIRST as a whole, while advocating for STEAM opportunities for all.
We exceeded even our own goals and expectations by winning the Dunwoody Engineering Award, the Engineering Inspiration Award, and the Industrial Design Award. We remained undefeated in the Granite City regional qualifying rounds, became Alliance Captains at both the Granite City and Lake Superior Regionals, and were selected for an alliance at the FIRST World Championships.
Immediately following the 2023 season, we utilized summer workshops to teach new members how to use SolidWorks for 3D modeling and involve our incoming members in small projects that developed the technical and soft skills necessary for them to succeed in the 2024 season. We added experiences for students and mentors to bond with one another at our annual team retreat. Returning team members implemented our see-one, do-one, teach-one process to teach the new members to become bold and confident leaders that could excel at whatever the season threw their way.
Before the formal start of the season in January 2024, 1816 put newly defined procedures and timelines into place. We used the fall months to make robot-design guidelines, Gantt charts, and weekly team leadership meetings to lay the groundwork. We participated in the new game’s unveiling at the MURA (Minneapolis Urban Robotics Alliance) field, a practice field 1816 advocated for pre-Covid, with several other Twin Cities metro-based teams. This was a new experience for our team, launching a new collaborative brainstorm and strategy process. Meeting with other teams immediately after seeing the kickoff reveal broadcasts and being able to walk through potential scoring strategies and robot-movement strategies helped us visualize how the game would be played out at a real competition. Coming together with other teams, we brainstormed designs and exchanged ideas on what worked and what didn’t.
Given that we had about seven weeks before our first regional competition, we invested three weeks designing our robot using CAD, followed by prototyping and finalizing our concept. Next, we built the robot in our workshop using our in-house router and a dedicated fabrication to make customized parts. This rapid-build enabled a larger block of time for our software subteam and robot-drive team to code and change coding to better modify the robot and its programming for the competition environment. Our 2024 robot, nicknamed “ZEN,” also was ground zero for the revamp of our swerve drive drivetrain with the addition of newly released Kraken motors to power the robot’s swerve modules. This year’s game pieces were squishable foam rings known as “notes.” Our robot used an under-the-bumper perimeter game piece intake to collect the notes and feed our shooter using compliant wheels to score points.
“The Green Machine” secured second place in the qualifying matches at the Lake Superior Regional, serving as the Alliance Captain of Alliance 2 alongside teams 4511- Power Amplified and 2977- Sir Lancer Bots. Due to our consistency and hard work to balance robot aesthetics and practicality, combined with our harmonious teamwork and modular design, the judges awarded us the Industrial Design Award, sponsored by General Motors. This award recognizes a team that can explain and demonstrate industrial design principles. 1816 advanced to the semi-finals and finished undefeated in the qualifying rounds, which earned us enough points and a berth in the Minnesota High School League State Robotics Championship. The Lake Superior Regional demonstrated our robot’s strengths as well as areas for improvement. We found areas where we could improve our team scouting process, making it more effective and accurate. We also realized that climbing wasn’t necessary to be a successful robot; instead, we could score more points by focusing on scoring in the speaker.
1816 participated in a new regional event in Minnesota, the Granite City Regional in St. Cloud. We identified a couple of needed changes in our prior event. One was a new way for us to handle scouting data and analysis. Our programming team developed a scouting app from scratch, allowing students to enter pertinent data and observations from any mobile device. This innovation revolutionized our scouting process, replacing manual note-taking with button presses that automatically recorded data into a spreadsheet. This made scouting significantly easier, and it allowed us to share match strategy and other information with our alliance partners as well as with teams that needed additional data or couldn’t scout on their own. Our alliance match strategies changed remarkably because of the accuracy and real-time details of opposing teams that came from the app. We also encountered problems with the note collector, finding that the notes were not moving smoothly through the collector and even getting stuck. To fix this, we swapped out polycords and replaced them with belts which made us more consistent and, in turn, allowed for quicker cycles.
At Granite City, “The Green Machine” ranked 5th in the qualifying matches and moved up to the Alliance 4 captain spot. We picked Team 876-Thunder Robotics and Team 8188-Grand Force as alliance partners. Together, we advanced to the finals against the number-one alliance. We didn’t win the final match, but we were honored with the Engineering Inspiration Award, for our outreach efforts and dedication to advocacy. Since 1816 was already qualified to attend the FIRST Championship as a member of the FIRST Hall of Fame, the award generated a wild card opportunity, which was passed on to Team 8188. It was the first time that team 8188 was qualified to attend the World Championship. At this regional, one of our founding mentors, Mark Lawrence, was honored for his contributions to FIRST across Minnesota and North Dakota, as he retires from active event committee leadership.
At the FIRST Championship, Team 1816 placed 18th in the Johnson division and was selected by the 6th Alliance to play alongside the Team 3647 Millennium Falcons, Team 2642 Pit Pirates, and Team 4391 Brave Bots. We advanced to the third round of the playoffs and, even more importantly, 1816 formed a multi-team scouting partnership with teams from across the world. We gained valuable competition experience as well as valuable inputs from teams worldwide to make improvements to the app.
We competed at the one-day, Minnesota State Robotics Championship at Williams Arena to wrap up our 2024 season. We were not picked for an elimination alliance, but we earned one of the prestigious Outstanding Engineering awards from Dunwoody College of Technology. This award is very difficult to achieve since the team must be able to describe in minute detail the fabrication and operating mechanisms of the robot.
In keeping with our student engagement and leadership goal of promoting equity in STEAM, “The Green Machine” continued community outreach efforts. With the SWIFT- FRC (Support Welcoming Inclusion of FIRST Teams) initiative with our fellow lead influencer team, FRC 2177-The Robettes, 1816 produced, traded and gave away nearly 900 friendship bracelets with FIRST and team Core Values and inspirational messages to teams competing in regionals and the FIRST Championship. We made quarterly appearances at the in-house Star Studio of Minnesota Children’s Hospital to show off our robot and conduct science experiments for patients in-hospital. We helped recycle printers at sponsor HID headquarters; promoted the FIRST mission to the Edina School District’s superintendent; participated in the Edina 200 celebration of state championships, and continued to grow engagement and participation by girls and those that identify as female via our annual Girls in the Workshop programming.
“The Green Machine” had an outstanding FIRST in Show season, excelling in robot competitions, awards, and engineering outreach to our communities. The stage is now set for our team to move forward with confidence into the 2025 FIRST DIVE season. All levels of FIRST programs will have games with ocean themes. Join us as we navigate the FRC “Reefscape” presented by Haas challenge!
–By Marcos L-N and Venna W.