River Dell’s robotic teams have been crushing the competition over their past few seasons. Last year, they won the states’ competition and made it to the World Competition which they got to go to Texas for and represented River Dell in magnificent manner.
Most recently, both Hypnotic Robotics and Bad Wolf were able to get pass semifinals and finals and win a recent competition which earned them a spot in the league tournament on February 23.
If they finish high enough they will be able to go to New Jersey State Championships on March 16.
Due to the recent rise in members, the team has decided to split into two different teams: Hypnotic Robotics and Bad Wolf. This is so that everyone has a chance to do their part in the process as well as having the older members of Hypnotic Robotics mentor and help out the younger members in Bad Wolf.
The captains of Bad Wolf are, sophomore, Seoyeon Kim, and, junior, Sushil Muthuvelkumar. The team was recently created due to the rise in member numbers.
Aside from working on the robot and communicating between each other, the team also has to focus on creating an engineering portfolio. The team explained that although they had some malfunction with their robot where it is programmed to move they were able to score high in the specimen.
In order to improve their performance for the next competition, captain Seoyeon Kim commented that, “Sushil 3D printed a new claw, which will be able to grab the samples more precisely and accurately, especially when some are closely positioned together. We are working on an auto where the robot will be able to put 2 specimen, and hopefully more, in the 30 second time period.” These changes esnured that they will do a great job at the next competition.
Parker Cermak-Hosein, a junior, is the president of the Hypnotic Robotics and Subham Kumar, senior, is the programmer and another senior, David Suen is the engineer. Them and the rest of their team has been working very hard these past few seasons and were able to get to World’s last year!
Parker’s outreach in the community and use of social media has really helped a lot of people hear about robotics and a big part of the team’s improvement. Her response to improvements for the following competition was, “So, we have judge awards about like community outreach and your school and club and that is included in the engineering portfolio. We’re definitely improving that because we will be judged on that and hopefully win awards which could qualify us for the state tournament.”
The robotics team, as mentioned before, has increased their numbers significantly especially due to their community outreach in the school and they now have between 25-30 members from the 12 members or so from previous years. This has exposed many students to the many skills that they can take away from joining robotics which Dr. Houston mentions are, “In general, organization, time management, teamwork, dividing and conquering and in terms of technical skills: programming, electronics, engineering, using computerate designs to plan.”
Most recently, Hypnotics Robotics earned a spot in the March 16th State Tournament.
