Robotics Team Compete

Despite the pandemic, the Poway High School Robotics team, Team SPYDER, is still hard at work and has recently participated in three big events. 

The first was the Innovation Challenge on March 26, where teams must present an innovative solution to a problem. 

The team presented the “The Robotic Assistant Companion” or TRAC. “The idea is that it can help you in reminding you to be physically active and help you in your mental health,” head coach Roger Dohm said. 

The second event, which took place on March 27, was the Chairman’s Presentation, a showcase of  everything the team has been working on from their competitive robot, to community outreach, to training. 

On March 29, the team presented their ideas for a future Robot Game, themed around an excavation site. While winners for the three competitions have not yet been announced, they are expected to be released by June.
Now, the team continues to prepare for the Robot Game portion of the competition. They will participate in both the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). “The large FRC Robot shoots balls into a target and picks them up off the ground to then shoot them. The smaller FTC robot picks up rings and then shoots them into a goal and knocks down targets as well as picks up a wobble goal and places it in a zoon for points,” head coach Roger Dohm said. 

The FTC team was filled with people dedicated to learning the requisite STEM skills to get a robot to execute a task, and we were able to have the robot Perform well enough to qualify for the Regional. Our robot got damaged, so we are spending the majority of our preparation time overcoming that obstacle and adapting the programming and re-training the drivers accordingly.” said spyder team member Marshal Hamon. 

The first events for both competitions took place virtually, the FIRST Tech Challenge three weeks ago and the First Robotics Competition one week ago.