Many people can say that they have found something they are passionate about, and many people can say that they contributed to the successful completion of a task.  However, not many people can say that they have helped build a robot that can pass to it’s teammates, shoot into goals over six feet tall, and score points without any human assistance. Not many people can say that they are part of a team that is ranked in the top ten in the world.  The forty members of the Walpole High School Robotics Team — the RoboRebels — can proudly say all of these statements apply to them.

At the FIRST Robotics World Championship at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, MO, four hundred teams competed for the title of World Champion.  On April 24, the teams split into four separate brackets: Archimedes, Curie, Galileo, and Newton.  The Walpole RoboRebels competed in the Galileo bracket, and by the end of the weekend, they placed 7th out of 400 teams.

On Saturday morning, the last qualifying games were played and then the Alliance Selection took place.  There are eight alliances in the playoffs, so the top eight teams are designated as Alliance captains.  From there each captain gets to choose three additional teams to join their alliance. Since only three teams compete for each alliance in a match, the team captain chooses which three of the four teams will participate in each match. This extra team allows for the captains to be more strategic; for example, they could select a very defensive robot as their fourth alliance member, in case they ever want to take a very defensive approach.

The RoboRebels (Team 1153) were ranked second in the Galileo Division, so they were able to choose their three teammates.  They selected team 4488 (from Hillsboro, OR), 1318 (from Issaquah, WA), and 1218 (from Philadelphia, PA).

On Saturday afternoon, the teams returned to the field for the elimination matches, where winning two matches would advance them to the next round.  In the quarter-finals, the RoboRebels led their alliance to two wins to secure their victory over the #7 Alliance.  Then, in the semi-finals, Team 1153 triumphed over the #3 Alliance.  In the finals, Walpole’s alliance was matched up against the #5 Alliance.  After losing the first match, the RoboRebels were able to force the finals into a third game as each alliance had won one match at that point.  However, the RoboRebels lost the third match and thus were eliminated from the competition.

Despite their incredibly strong finish at the World Championships, the RoboRebels season did not start off well.  At their first event at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in March, the team’s shooter broke and they did not make the playoffs. But, after fixing the shooter after the WPI competition, the robot did not have any more mechanical problems for the rest of the season.

Head of Robotics Mr. Dustin Scott said, “Our biggest weakness had become our strength, and in the downtime while we were broken, we learned to play the whole game — subtle strategy, defense, passing, in-bounding, etc. — which many teams never mastered.  It made us strong in all areas of the game.  I guess in a way our difficulties at WPI really were a blessing in disguise.”

The rest of the RoboRebels’ season consisted of a series of competitions where they kept finding ways to move on to the next competition.  After the regional competition at Northeastern, Team 1153 was selected to attend the New England Championship event at Boston University in early April.  However, the team was unsure whether or not they would even get to attend this competition.  In the end, enough teams declined their attendance so that the RoboRebels were one of the last place seeds going into Boston University.

By the end of the qualifying rounds, they made it clear that they deserved to be at that competition.  They were ranked #2 and continued into the playoff rounds where they lost in the quarterfinals.  Again, Team 1153 was one of the last teams to receive an invitation to the World Championship event in St. Louis.  The RoboRebels had a short amount of time to decide whether they had the finances to travel across the country to attend this competition.  In the end, the RoboRebels managed to get the funds they needed, so they made travel plans and headed to Missouri.

Team 1153 had the most successful season in their history, but they are still looking for ways to improve.  “The most important goal we have every year is to inspire the students to do a little more than they thought was possible,” Scott said. “I want them each to know that engineering and technology careers are within reach, even if you’re not a techie or an engineer.”