Original submitted by Donna (Yip) Lew, CHS Class of 1965
Congratulations to team XBOT #488 for qualifying for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) FIRST Robotics Championship at Eastern Washington University! Students work alongside engineering professionals to design, build, and program a 125 lb. robot to compete at the local, PNW, and World Championship events. Winning matches at the Sammamish High School and Auburn High School events truly paid off. Team 488 is ranked in the top one-sixth of the 132 teams in the PNW district and the top one-third of the 50 teams competing at the PNW Championship.
The icing on the cake was the Innovation in Control Award sponsored by nVent, which celebrates an innovative control system or application of control components — electrical, mechanical, or software =- to provide unique machine functions. The team developed an innovative machine-learning pipeline that in real time – automatically tracked open slots (36 slots on a hexagonal center scoring field element) for the robot to be able to score points. The robot’s sophisticated camera system and program recognized an April tag (a two-dimensional barcode used for robotics and computer vision applications, allowing for precise 3D localization of objects from a single image) for the robot to calculate the fastest path and drive automatically to one of six scoring positions and scored a game element on an open slot.
We congratulate the students of team XBOT #488 from Franklin and Cleveland High Schools for their outstanding achievements!
For more information on this robotics competition, visit https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc
