After weeks of preparing Xavier and Elaine for battle, the Andover Robotics club had to stand back and watch while their robots attempted to best their competition. On Saturday, April 5, five members of the Andover Robotics Club traveled to the University of Massachusetts-Lowell to compete in the New England Regional Botball Tournament and determine the fate of their two robots. The team placed sixth in the Double Elimination Round. Under the leadership of President Alex Dehnert ’08, the members prepared for the tournament with weekly meetings. Club Member Christian Anderson ’09 said, “We had to program the robots ourselves—that’s the cool part.” “Tons and tons of ideas were on the drawing board and then were never implemented,” said Anderson, who mentioned the idea of using grappling hooks to pull the bridges down or having the robot deploy its own bridges. “We spent at least two hours a week for six weeks [working on the robots], and David Luan ’09 apparently spent four days straight [over spring break working on the robots],” said Anderson. “Once you’ve learned one programming language, it’s pretty easy to pick up another one,” said Dehnert, who has been programming for years on his own. At the end of six weeks, the club had two robots, Xavier and Elaine. Elaine was named after a web comic series entitled XKCD, series 1337, featuring a main character, Elaine. The robots were designed to move autonomously—after pressing the initial button, the team could not use remote controls to direct their robots. “A principle of robotics is KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid]. I think we did a decent job of keeping our robots simple,” said Anderson. The Andover Robotics Club is new this year—it was started with the help of a $3,700 Abbot Grant. The botball tournament was a national competition with local tournaments, the participants were required to pay a registration fee of $2,300. The remaining funds went towards the purchase of materials, such as Lego bricks and motors. Dehnert has been involved with robotics since the ninth grade. “Back at my old school, if you were interested in computer programming or computer science, there were limited ways of engaging that interest, so I chose robotics and I just kept on doing robotics,” said Dehnert. The Andover Robotics Club describes the Botball Tournament as a learning experience. Anderson said, “Everybody has the same information and all the same parts. Everyone starts out with the same goal and the same pieces, and I was impressed by the variety of stuff people came up with.” Andover High School won the Double Elimination round, and Malden Catholic High School won overall. But the members of the PA club are not deterred by their competition. “Alex will be graduating this year, so he’ll be passing the torch to somebody else, and we’ll probably be competing in Botball again,” said Anderson. “I think we’ll probably place a lot higher next year. That’s our goal.”
