Local rookie FTC robotics team heads to East Super-Regional Championship

It has been an exciting time for “Techie Titans”, a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team from Nova Labs Robotics of Reston, VA. It was their first (rookie) FTC season but they advanced to state championships in both Virginia and Maryland with multiple awards from regional tournaments. The excitement did not stop there – they advanced further to the East Super-Regional Championship tournament from Virginia State Championship held on Feb 13, 2016. With “Inspire Award” 2nd place, they became overall 2nd from Virginia. Their hard work over past several months has paid off!

The Techie Titans consists of a group of very enthusiastic middle and high schoolers from multiple schools in Fairfax and Loudon County including TJHSST, each bringing their own strengths. All of them have multiple years of experience with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics and FLL (FIRST Lego League).

The team started its journey in early summer of 2015, much ahead than other rookie teams and was very active since then to learn about FTC and the new technology platform. “That was one of the key success factors for the team”, said the lead coach Mr. Rahman. He was the lead coach of an FLL team from Nova Labs last year and decided to move on to FTC, instead of continuing FLL. The Team members started meeting at NOVA Labs once a week at the beginning of the season and later met several times a week, with long sessions before tournaments. Nova Labs is a well-known makerspace based in Reston, Virginia, and has houses classrooms, workspace, and a shop with common tools and advanced fabrication equipment in its 10,000+ sq. ft. facility.

Even though FTC is a lot of work, the team works together well. The team is divided into several sub-teams such as build, programming, CAD, outreach, and fundraising. FTC is way more than building robots. Coaches and mentors are the gel who coordinate and mentor the team very well. They help the team with anything they need whether it be parts that need to be ordered or pizza they need to eat late night etc.

FTC is one of the robotics programs organized by FIRST for students in grades 7-12. The competition is very challenging and teams are responsible for designing, constructing, and programming a robot to compete against other teams in tournament. Teams, along with their coaches, mentors, and volunteers develop strategy and build their robots based on reliable engineering principles. Robots are built from robot kits, metals, and 3D printed pieces and controlled by Qualcomm Snapdragon-based processor in FTC Android Platform based on Java programming. Awards and recognition are given out for the competition and other real-world aspects of FTC, such as design, innovation, and community outreach.

Regarding the competition, each year FTC releases a new challenge. This year’s challenge is called the “FIRST RES-Q”. There are 4 teams in each game and one team is paired with another team. The paired team versus another paired team compete in the playing field. The game starts with 30 seconds Autonomous round where the robot is preprogrammed to move on its own and complete missions. In the next 2-minute, each team controls the robot with remote joy sticks and scores by performing different actions, such as by delivering Rescue Climbers to a shelter, retrieving debris from the playing field and placing them in mountain or floor goals, and also by hanging the robot from a pull-up bar during the last 30-seconds of a match.

A big part of FTC is the community outreach program, by which teams reach out to the community and spread STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) knowledge in events that will help the community. Techie Titans did several community outreach programs including event at Gum Spring library on Jan 10, 2016 where they gave information on FIRST Robotics to help coaches and team members. It was a huge success. Ever since people have been asking for more and the team in planning for similar session in the near future. In Early September, 2015, the team organized an FLL workshop “FLL Success! – Best Practices for Coaches and Kids” at Nova Labs, with presentation and a live demo of their last year’s FLL robot. It was a great success also. They also hosted a Programming workshop for FTC in early September, 2015, explaining the new FTC Android platform and a live demo of their first FTC robot. The team is planning to host some FTC and FLL related workshops in this summer.

Techie Titans team is excited to compete at the Super Regionals in March 18-20, at The University of Scranton, PA. 72 top teams from 12 states and the District of Columbia will compete in the FTC East Super-Regional Championship for spots in World Championship to be held in St Louis, MO in April 2016. That is the ultimate challenge in Robotics for middle and high school kids and the rookie FTC team “Techie Titans” wants to do well and qualify for the World Championship.