Rose basketball highlights
Issue 1
September 27th, 2019
Robotics team ramps up to Worlds
WED. | 4-19-23 | NEWS
The Pitt Pirates robotics team is competing in the FIRST Robotics international competition (FRC) also known as the Worlds competition on Wednesday, April 19 through Saturday, April 22. The robotics team is not solely a Rose team but does have several Rose members. Junior Hunter Nelson has been on the Pitt Pirates for three years. The Pirates will compete against teams from all across the nation and the globe.
“FRC teams from all over the world like China, Australia, Israel and Turkey, and all over the US, all compete in Houston to see who’s the best in the world,” Nelson said.
The Pitt Pirates were established in 2007 and this year the team consists of 35 members with five to ten mentors who lead the team. The Pirates go through steps of constructing and testing the robots to complete a certain task for their upcoming competition.
“At the beginning of the building period, once we get the game for the year, we prototype and figure out what our robot needs to do,” Nelson said. “We then continue to iterate through
Photo by Casey Foeller
those prototypes to find which will be the best to do whatever the task is that year and at the end we put it all together into a robot.”
Thus far, the Pirates have competed in three competitions and continue to place higher each time.
“We didn’t do too well at our first competition because we didn’t have enough time to prepare, but we won our second district competition,” Nelson said. “We then came in fourth overall at states and moved on to Worlds.”
The Pirates were one of 14 teams from North Carolina to move to the Worlds competition. At competitions, teams are assigned alliances to work with to beat other groups. They use these alliances to make it to playoffs.
“You are randomly paired up with two other teams to compete against another three teams and in the beginning during the 60 opening matches, those are completely random,” Nelson said. “Once you move on to the playoffs, you actually get to choose your alliance and you stick with them as you move through the playoffs and hopefully win.”
The Worlds competition will be longer from previous competitions the Pirates have attended.
“It’s going to be three days instead of the normal two,” Nelson said. “The first two days are the 60 ranking point matches and the last day is playoffs where they will decide the winner.”
The Pitt Pirates will be joining over 600 teams at Worlds and have made preparations for the upcoming competition.
“We’re trying to see what we can fix in our robots from previous competitions and just making sure that we get enough practice in to know that we’ll hopefully do well,” Nelson said.
