BY JENNIFER AMATO
Staff Writer
SCOTT PILLING staff Raider Robotix members Corey Balint (l to r), Vishal Ramani and Neil Parikh review the base of the team’s robot, “Evil Machine 4.0: The Enforcer,” which led them to a second-place victory at the world championships at the Georgia Dome. In a competition equivalent to the Olympics of robotics, the North Brunswick Township High School Raider Robotix team placed second in the world at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Competition in Georgia at the end of April.
Held at the Georgia Dome, which is near Olympic Park in Atlanta, the engineering competition involved students from 1,100 teams from 18 countries including Israel, Brazil and Singapore. Team 25 from North Brunswick, with their robot “Evil Machine 4.0: The Enforcer,” came into the world championships with an undefeated record of 31-0 from regionals in Trenton and Las Vegas over the past two months.
“I had never really known about Robotix before this year, but to go there and see all the kids is very exciting,” team member Lisa Chen said.
After an hour-and-a-half plane delay and confusion with hotel rooms, the team got a good night’s rest and awoke early Thursday morning to inspect their robot – checking the bumpers, wheels and bolts. They then began their journey competing with 344 other teams during 14 rounds, their first loss coming on the last day of qualifying before the elimination rounds began.
“I knew it would happen in time. It’s great winning every round, but you’re going to lose one. It was kind of an eye-opener, like ‘What do we do now? We have to adapt,’ ” Alison Rankin said.
For the championship round, the Raider Robotix team was paired with a team from California and a team from Connecticut, which helped each other out by dumping the foam volleyballs to the ground and then scooping them up to shoot them into the basketball-type net. Yet because of a fellow robot’s motor burning out during the finals, the Raiders team lost the competition by four points.
“It was really sad and kind of like, ‘Did that just happen?’ ” Rankin said. “It was hard work, a lot of teamwork, and we thought we could do it.”
“We got very far compared to other years. We had a lot of fun doing it, too. With winning and accomplishing so much, more people now know who we are,” Samantha Hires said.
Despite the competition loss, the team received the Delphi Driving Tomorrow’s Technology Award for innovative design and robot design due to their shooting mechanism being mounted on one single axis, enabling it to turn and shoot. The idea was developed with the assistance of six Bristol-Myers Squibb engineers who worked with the students on their robot: Michael Lubniewski, Tony Kukulski, Walter Suchowiecki, John Dusko, Charles Smaltino and Kevin Durham.
“It’s pretty good because it’s a really prestigious award, especially at the national level,” Bhadra said.
The students also received the Chairman’s Award for best representing a model other teams can emulate and the Woody Flowers Award for best coaching during the New Jersey regional.
Although the students did not achieve first-place standings despite their stellar season, they achieved lessons greater than just winning from the competition: they learned science, teamwork and sportsmanship.
“It really brought the team together, I’d say, and made it something quite formidable,” Shoham Bhadra said.
“We did really well this season. We didn’t win, but that’s not important. It’s about more than that. It’s about seeing things work magically,” Vijay Venkataraman said. “It went really quickly from disappointment to joy when we found out we were the runners-up because it was a big accomplishment coming in second because there were so many teams in the nation and the world.”
With their 45-5 season completed, in the off-season the team will participate in a few smaller events, including two in the next two weeks, and will help developing teams improve their robotics programs. They will hold a summer Lego camp at Our Lady of Peace Church on Route 130 during July, and will begin building their new robot next year when the new competition parameters are set.
Raider Robotix is sponsored by Royal Hawaiian Creations, Letter Perfect Logos, Time Warner, IBEW Local and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Anyone looking to sponsor the team can contact coach Wayne Cokeley at (732) 289-3700, ext. 4072.
For more information about the team, go to www.RaiderRobotix.org or www.USFIRST.org.