Ridgeview Robotics takes 1st and 2nd place at the Colorado Northwest Region Tournament

Congratulations to both Ridgeview Robotics teams for taking 1st and 2nd place at the Colorado Northwest Region tournament and advancing to the Colorado State Championships on February 22nd.  The teams advanced through six qualifying rounds and a semi-final championship round to earn the right to meet each other in the Finals.  In the final Alliance match, the Ridgeview Alliance Team (14953) scored a tournament record 210 points to win.  This score was just 8 points shy of the current Colorado State record and sets them up to be one of the top contenders at State.

This year’s robotics competition requires the teams to design, build and program a robot that can autonomously find and collect balls and cubes of various weights and then score them on the right level of a tower using vision systems, sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms while avoiding playing field obstacles that are designed to high center/disable the robot.  The robots also need to be able to move to a corner of the playing field and spin a wheel the right direction to drop yellow duckies on the playing field floor for additional points.  The robots can be driven using two gamepads for the middle and end game portion of the competition where fast driving/reaction skills as well as efficient intake processing and scoring systems are critical. 

This year’s robots each utilize a central processing computer embedded in a control hub; an expansion hub for additional motor, servo and sensor ports; six motors with encoder capabilities to track movements; eight distance and color sensors (would have had more but ran out of ports); a camera used for artificial intelligence object detection; three servos that mimic the movement of an arm to pick up and score game elements as well as a servo with a  sensor to automatically detect the presence of a game element to move and score it; a wireless chip that allows the robot to connect to a phone with two gamepads that has every button and joy stick programmed to make the robot move and perform.

Congratulations to both teams for their hard work and achievement and a special thank you to the Johnston-Hanson Foundation for supporting and funding these teams as well as funding the classroom robotics class that built four-wheel drive, off-roading, ping pong ball shooting robots that created a bit of excitement on the elementary school playground and put dents in the computer lab walls (6,000 RPM motors shoot ping pong balls a little too fast).

Robotics Team 13022

Damien Y.

Daniel Y.

Brady T.

Catherine A.

Camille V.

Willem S.

Omar A.

Robotics Team 14953

Ryan O.

Jacob M.

Andrew T.

Oskar B.

Lena R.

Lena’s Little Brother

Chase W.

Tali S.

Mentors

Mr. Rhead

Miss. O’Neil

James Harding