Lynbrook RoboticsFIRST Robotics Team #846

Congratulations to the team for finishing the San Diego regional! We did well: the judges awarded us the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award for our advanced software features, and we got a chance to show off all of the functions that we had originally planned for our robot.

We finally figured out the huge controllability problems that we’d been suffering from the whole competition–a combination of simple issues, such as a disconnected gear shifter motor. After discovering this, we instantly started scoring and driving responsively, and we could lift ourselves reliably! That allowed us to start winning qualification matches.

This was a really tough issue to fix, since we could never reproduce it in the pits or on the practice field. Thinking it was an elusive software bug, we made incredible optimizations to our code, and the software team is confident that we now have one of the fastest-running robot programs.

Now, our results: during our qualification rounds yesterday, we went 2 wins – 5 losses–primarily because of the gearbox issues. Today, we went 2 wins – 1 loss in qualifications. We were selected by the number 7 alliance, with teams 815 and 1332. Right away, we went up in a very tough quarter-final round against the 2nd and 3rd seed teams, and unfortunately lost 2 matches against them, ending the competition for us.

Despite running into some obstacles, our robot was successful at San Diego after fixing that controllability issue. Our systems generally work, and I was incredibly proud of our team, seeing that robot lift up–the crowd screamed!

–David Liu, Co-President

While most members of Lynbrook Robotics have been busily working on the current Breakaway game since January, several members have also attended and succeeded at a few major tournaments in Speech and Debate.

This past weekend, February 6th and 7th, several Lynbrook Robotics team members competed in one of the largest high school speech and debate tournaments in the nation. The Stanford Invitational brought together over 1,500 students from all over the country. Vice President Chinmay Jaju took 1st place in Expository speech, beating out nearly 60 other competitors. Chinmay has always done well in this event, placing highly in other competitions, but he finally broke through this weekend after giving sensational speeches about Villains, appropriately mixing excellent presentation skills, astounding visual aids, and beautiful rhetoric.

In Parliamentary debate, modeled after the British Parliamentary system, two LRT members advanced into elimination rounds. This was the largest division of Parliamentary Debate ever in a high school tournament, with over 110 teams entered into the pool. This meant that teams needed to achieve a record of 4-2 or better with a great quality of consisting speaking ability. Parliamentary Debate is unique among debate events because teams only get the topics 20 minutes before the debate begins, and competitors must be well versed in current global affairs. Webmaster Karthik Viswanathan and his partner, Ruicong Yan, advanced to elimination rounds placing in the top 32. Veteran member Aditya Majumdar, and his partner, Indranil Bora, also advanced to double octafinals (top 32 teams) after having been the 9th seed and advancing to late elimination rounds in 2009 as well. These two teams were among 6 Lynbrook teams to advance out of preliminary rounds, setting a tournament record.

Three weeks ago, a few of these members also attend the James Logan Invitational in Union City. This tournament drew over 1000 competitors as well, with competitors flying in from 7 states, and with over 100 entries in each event. In Parliamentary Debate, rookie member Elliot Young advanced to Double Octafinals with his partner, Anjana Rao. This is an excellent achievement as it was Elliot’s first varsity tournament of this size! Aditya Majumdar narrowly missed advancing in Parliamentary Debate by just one rank. He did advance to Quarterfinals in Impromptu Speaking, and won 9th place in National Extemporaneous speaking; both of these events involve severely limited preparation time and necessitate quick thinking.

Please congratulate these students for their successes while handling both programs concurrently!

- Aditya

Lynbrook Robotics co-President David Liu was named a finalist in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search yesterday at a surprise assembly of the entire Lynbrook student body. David Liu and Raman Nelajanti were presented oversize checks for $7,500. David’s continuing work in “Semantic Image Retrieval and Interactive Exploration of Large Image Collections” has application in medical imaging, web search engines, and processing aerial images. Congratulations David, and good luck in the final competition in Washington DC.

Hey everyone,

On Saturday, Abhinav Sinha, Haochuan Ni, and Aditya Majumdar’s dad refitted the crate. Specifically, we created a back access panel that would allow us to open the back of the crate and do work on whatever is in the crate without having to open the main front panel and haul the things out. Special thanks to Aditya’s dad for supervising us and buying us a 24 pack of Sun chips!

- Haochuan

Hi everyone,

We made the tower and platform yesterday at Mr. Haas’s house. In Breakaway, robots can suspend themselves on the tower for bonus points. Our mockup of the tower will allow us to experiment with different ways to hang a robot from the tower. Robots may also climb on the tower or drive through the tunnel under the platform to move from one field area to another. The tunnel’s clearance is quite low (16 inches), and driving under it can be very impractical and design-compromising.

The pictures below shows us working on structure, and the last picture shows the finished product. The tower/platform is still at Mr. Haas’s workshop, and will have to be partly disassembled in order to bring it over to Abhinav’s garage. Special thanks to Steve’s mom for providing food and driving all of us over, and to Mr. Haas for providing us with his workshop, equipment, and materials to construct our tower.

- Haochuan