Liberty High School's robotics team finishes 26th in FIRST Robotics Rebound Rumble

PORTLAND -- While a hoard of teenagers were busy cheering on their favorite high school teams last weekend at the 6A state boys basketball tournament at the Rose Garden, another kind of basketball tournament was going on right next door. The Rebound Rumble.

The Memorial Coliseum was swarming with basketball-playing robots -- and plenty of budding engineers -- during the two-day Oregon FIRST Robotics regional competition.

Liberty High School's robotics team was there to compete with 65 other teams from around the Pacific Northwest and as far away as Hawaii, California and Mexico.

Liberty finished 26th at the event, not enough to qualify to go on to compete at the championships, slated for April in St. Louis.

But Liberty team spokesman Aakash Jani said his team members were pleased with the way their robot performed. "Overall we feel that our robot did pretty well considering the issues that we faced," he said.

Each team brought its own 120-pound robot, designed, engineered and built by students in just six weeks. To score points, the robots needed to navigate the competition arena, shoot basketballs, climb ramps and balance on a "seesaw" platform.

But the biggest challenge for Liberty's team, Jani said, was the robot's mechanical arm.

"We had to redesign our arm mechanism almost five times at the competition to fit constraints, which was an initial oversight on our part."

That task kept the team busy between matches. "They haven't had a lot of down time," said advisor and Liberty High School teacher Milt Scholl.

In between nine qualifying rounds during the two-day tournament, team members hung out in "the pit."

Excerpt from:
Liberty High School's robotics team finishes 26th in FIRST Robotics Rebound Rumble