Home Page of Highland Robotics

The First Logo

At 10:00pm look what happened at crunch time at Highland Robotics. The following video is when we finished most of our pneumatics system, but we have made many improvements since. Our new pneumatics system will have angle adjustment and will be much more powerful to improve the launching speed. As per our electrical team last year, the wiring will be very neat and clean. Our mechanical team has done much to improve the chassis, including making the base wider rather than longer.

We hope that every team is going to be ready to compete at the FIRST Lunacy competition.

FIRST's Lunacy Logo

As a notice to all highland robotics members, YOU MUST turn in your answers to the chairman’s award. This award is given to the team(s) who show gracious professionalism, community involvement, engaging people to learn about FIRST and their community, and give students the skills that they will use in a real-life application. FIRST is one of the most amazing organizations that is not only for students, but for adults, educators, engineers, programmers, and the general community that forms around people aiding one another in any of the FIRST’s competitions. While the FIRST community is spreading throughout the United States, and other countries like Canada, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Great Brittan, Israel, Mexico, Philippines, and Turkey, we hope that FIRST will continue to grow and prosper.

“Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.” — Roger Lewin

While the list of countries involved in FIRST is long, we hope that the list will become even longer, and comprise of several more nations. The community is still growing, and we hope that the students and mentors involved will learn not what they have been taught, but what they will need to solve the problems of what they haven’t been taught.

Even in the midst of a recession, people are still willing to sponsor FIRST teams due to their success and application of what FIRST teaches. By teaching the students of today what the students of yesterday haven’t learned, we can make some of the most innovative decisions in history.

“The students of today will solve all of the problems of the previous generations, and will find more questions for not only them, but the next generation too.” — Dr. Cindy Wheeler

Today was a sad day for Highland Robotics. Due to the fact that we are affiliated with Highland High School, we must abide with the Highland High School Policy. The main issue that we have is Liability. If someone were to post something bad or of ill intent, we would be reprimanded. Depending on the severity, we may have been expelled. While the forums are down, Highland Robotics will still carry on, and bring you updates through the main site.

As for those updates, we have begun work on our firing mechanism. While It is still very primitive, we have uploaded a video of how the mock prototype looks like, and behaves. You can find the video located on youtube.

In addition to making the firing mechanism, we have mounted the encoders, and after a little bit of trouble (wires breaking) we were able to make them work properly, and eliminate most, if not all of the slipping that was occurring.

With the new implementations of the Highland Robotics website, I have been making change to the back-end of the server. While still fully supporting Wordpress, we will also be running PhPbb as a part of our forum project. The forum will allow veterans, mentors, current members, and the general public to see what it is that we are doing at Highland Robotics. Allowing all of us to be corrected is one of the most important values that we can have. By having more people involved, we can expand Highland Robotics to anyone that wishes to help. We will also use the forum to educate everyone that is willing to learn.

The forum will soon be up and running, and can be visited any time by anyone. I hope the forum will prove useful not only to us, but also to the rest of the FIRST community. We will have daily updates be posted, along with ideas, and suggestions.

Keep a close eye on the website as there will be changes to it almost daily for a time to come. I will also announce when the forum is fully completed.

The forums will require all users registering to be at least 13 years of age in compliance with COPPA (Child Online Privacy Protection Act)

You can visit the forum at http://highlandrobotics.com/forums/

As always, if you see any problems or errors, please e-mail us at admin@highlandrobotics.com

Highland Robotics is starting again for the 2008-2009 competition. We will be displaying our progress from last year at the open house on September 4th. We would be delighted if people were to stop by and visit our table for more information, and a possible demonstration. You will also be able to talk to people who have been in Highland Robotics since it’s foundation last year. For more information, please browser the website, and take a flier at the open house if you wish.

We hope for many new people to join Highland Robotics for a fun and interesting year.

Today we are going in front of Highland High School’s Board of Education to show our appreciation, and to demonstrate what we have learned through the course of this endeavor.  This is also to show how valuable the knowledge we gain here is in a real life application.  Guidelines are given, and you must use knowledge that is on the forefront of what we are currently learning in high school. The  majority of the ideas used in making our robot were thought of and manipulated by the students. Our task was to better understand and engage in creatively thinking of a way to solve a simple goal with a seemingly infinite amount of complex solutions.  To the Board of Education that governs over Highland High School- thank you for allowing us to build a strong foundation on which we have learned valuable skills for many future careers.

At the FIRST Buckeye Regional there were 46 teams, and a large array of outcomes, both good, and unfavorable. We were amongst only a few teams that were new this year. The veterans were amazing in helping us, and we could not have progressed as far as we did without them. The necessity of improvements became apparent as the practice matches revealed errors. We continued through the practice rounds with the guidance of our mentors. With that, the first day of matches ended.

On the second day, the qualifying matches began to reveal who would choose, or be chosen. As we clawed and maneuvered our way up the ladder, we quickly realized that our goal of having more wins than losses was starting to become a reality. After the rounds were over, we had the ability to alter our robot (Fluffy) to make it ready for the matches that were far more competitive than we expected them to be. At the end of all the matches, the final seeds were posted. The team rejoiced as we placed 20th out of 46 teams that consisted mainly of veteran teams for years past.

The final day of competition had arrived and we were all very tired, and excited to compete against the other teams’ alliances that they had chosen that same day. After the top 8 teams choose their alliances the other teams were sorted in order of what rank they were in the seeding matches to become secondaries. We were secondaries since we were not chosen by the top eight seeded teams. The secondaries were there in case of any accidents, should put a robot out of commission. While we were not apart of the competition after that, we received THE ROOKIE INSPIRATION AWARD!!! The rookie Inspiration Award is the second highest award that are available to any team, and can only be obtained in the rookie team of that year. In the end we were unhappy that we were not chosen, but this was overcome by receiving of the second highest award in the entire competition.

The Following was made live at Kettering University’s Rookie FIRST Competition.

“Here at Kettering, we are posting this live and amending it as the competition is going on. We are currently waiting for our next round that was meant to start a while ago, but was postponed due to technical problems. We have won our first match by about two points, and were very lucky that the other team had a penalty or two. While we are waiting, we are having our robot inspected.

As the hours drone on, we are given renewed promises of a fixed computer system. We finally broke for an hour dinner after a few unsuccessful matches and they are attempting to fix the broken station. Crossing our fingers!! While we wait, we’re putting on a longer pole to keep the arm system from overextending. Basically, just small additions to make the robot even better. Other teams are having trouble just keeping their robot moving, so we’re one of the best here, I’d say.

Scores aren’t doing so well, we’re 5-6, and haven’t made up the dud round yet. Right now it is chaos, the caster wheels fell off during the last three rounds and there is a scramble (like a real nascar pit) to get it fixed in half an hour, and our round is coming sooooon. They just finished it! And they should join nascar. yaaay!! We actually have a bit of extra time, too. And Badger didn’t think they could do it. We’ve dropped to fourteenth or fifteenth. A few rounds ago, we had our best round, we both knocked down an opponent’s ball and put one of ours back up. Very good.

Well, the next round is about to start.. so OFF WE GO!!

Well, we just lost two more rounds. The second one, our robot didn’t even leave the start line. We’re trying to figure out what went wrong now. We only have a few more minutes until we queue up again and they still don’t know what the problem is. We’ll just have to hope for the best. We did well, we won our make-up round by two points.

All qualifying rounds are over and our rank is 16th. The top seven teams will pick alliance members and of the 24 teams here, 21 are expected to be on alliances. We have high hopes given our ranking and ability to knock down the ball so easily.”

Our accomplished goals:We made it to our first competition, competed, did as much as we could with what we could, and as an added bonus, we received the Rookie Safety award!

Welcome to the Highland Robotics web page, the official web page of the Highland Robotics FIRST Team 2603. We are devoted to the study of robotics, through understanding, learning, discovery, and innovation. We are currently planning on competing in the FIRST robotics competition in Flint, Michigan on March 7th, 2008. Then we will continue on to our next competition, the Buckeye Regional, on March 27th in Cleveland, Ohio. While we are a rookie team, we hope to rank amongst the top in as many aspects as we can. In our first ranked competition in Flint, Michigan, we hope to be amongst the top 45 teams. While some other teams have professional help, we relied mainly on our own ideas, and abilities. With this we must also give thanks to our organization of teachers, students, and the few adults that could spare some time from their schedules to aid us in the undertaking. The foundation of Highland Robotics is made of several core students that come nearly everyday, and do all that they can to better make use of the six weeks they had to make a robot, endearingly named Fluffy, from scratch.

Thanks to Patrick Beck, and Jordan Kessler