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BotCats win ‘Innovate Award’ for unique robot design

Prepare for Super Qualifiers on Feb.11

T-R PHOTOS BY NICK BAUR — Zander Pennington-Farmer showcasing the unique arm apparatus on the BotCats’ robot whose design won the group the ‘Innovate Award’ at the Iowa Wind League tournament in Fort Dodge.

The Marshalltown High School robotics team, the BotCats, will be heading to Super Qualifiers on Feb. 11 after winning the ‘Innovate Award’ during their Wind League Tournament in Fort Dodge back in early January.

The Innovate Award celebrates teams that think imaginatively, with ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to make their robot designs come to life. Elements of this award include elegant design, robustness, and ‘out of the box’ thinking related to robot design.

Each year in competitive robots, students across the state are tasked with building robots to accomplish specific tasks within certain time constraints.

This year, students were tasked with building a robot which could manually stack and move cups across a playing field into different areas and onto tall poles in order to score points.

As such, robot designs can vary from team to team and school to school, but because each team is trying to accomplish the same task, many robots begin to resemble one another in some form.

MHS Robotics 1 - From left to right, BotCats members Roan Jelken, Ethan Gale, Zander Pennington-Farmer and Matthew Bradley with their designed robot which recently won the ‘Innovate Award’ at the Iowa Wind League tournament in Fort Dodge.

Yet the BotCats, whose team includes a tight-knit group of four students, received the Innovate Award from judges due to their unique arm apparatus, which adorns the front of their robot and set the robot design apart from other competing teams.

The inception of the apparatus came about after the team experienced troubles placing cones on the tallest poles in the game, which award the most points and are critical to winning matches.

“For our robot game, we have to reach a certain height of poles to put cones on,” said BotCats member Roan Jelken. “But we couldn’t reach it. We could only reach the bottom one of the three.”

This design challenge kept the team from achieving high point totals in their matches, relegating them to simply pushing cones around the competition square and taking some rough losses throughout the season.

But the group persevered, going back to the drawing board in an attempt to find a solution to the persistent problem, leading to a design which differed greatly from their peers.

“Most teams kept the same arm design from what I saw,” said BotCats member Ethan Gale. “We kind of had to go through several processes.”

The initial design caused a few hiccups for the team, with the height throwing the robot off balance and causing it to tip over. But after several iterations and extensive troubleshooting, the team found a working solution.

With the BotCats being such a close group of friends as well as teammates, the problem solving process was not nearly as much of a headache for the four students, who often find themselves coming back to the team each year to be around one another.

“We’re all friends here. We all get to experiment a little bit and be a little bit creative,” BotCats member Zander Pennington-Farmer said. “At some point, the idea evolves and like makes itself almost.”

Now, with the newly minted arm apparatus and an Innovate Award in their pocket, the BotCats are headed to Norwalk on Feb. 11 to compete in the Super Qualifiers.

The Super Qualifiers are the competitive robotics equivalent to a substate sports final and exist as the final hurdle to the state competition.

“It was definitely better than what we were doing before,” said Pennington-Farmer. “I think with practice, we can score a lot of points with how it is now.”

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Contact Nick Baur at 641-753-6611 or nbaur@timesrepublican.com.

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