Allentown Robotics Peddie Robotics Win at Seneca!

Along with their partners from Burlington Township High School robotics team #5457, the Allentown Redbird Robotics team #1807 and The Peddie School Robotics team #5895 took the coveted win at the First Robotics District Seneca Event. The First Robotics Competition is an international high school robotics tournament organized by First where high school students are tested to build industrial-size robots to play within a challenging field game in alliance with other teams. First announces the concept and rules of each new game in January and then the robotic teams have only six weeks to design and build their robots. Students at Allentown High School fall under First’s Mid-Atlantic region and competed most recently during Week Four of the competition at the District Seneca event at Seneca high school in Tabernacle, NJ on March 25th and 26th. Redbird Robotics was one of 31 high school robotics teams competing. Redbird Robotics is a student run team and they designed and built their robot, this year named “Thunderbird.”
This year’s game, “Charged Up,” has two alliances of three teams each competing to score cubes and cones into their grid to charge up their community. There is a charging station on each side of the field and the alliances earn additional points if their robots are docked to or engaged with their charge station. Robots start each match in their community and they can be preloaded with either one cube or one cone. During the first 15 seconds of the match, robots are autonomous and the high school robotics teams have programmed their robots to work on their own to score preloaded game pieces. After the 15 seconds are up the drivers and the operators take control of their robots for the next two minutes and fifteen seconds trying to collect cubes and cones to place on the grids within their community. Each community contains three grids. The robots need to connect links which is a line of three game pieces scored on the same row. Completing enough links will earn the alliance extra points. As time runs out the robots’ race to their charging platform where they must balance to charge the station and if they do they earn more points. The alliance that scores the most points wins the match! Each alliance team is comprised of three robotics teams and they compete in 12 qualification matches during the events.
The Peddie School was ranked first in the competition at Seneca and selected to team up with Redbird Robotics and Burlington’s team for the play-offs. This strong alliance made it to the Finals where they then won the Seneca Competition and received the sought-after First Robotics blue banner to bring back to their schools. In addition to winning the Seneca competition Redbird Robotics also took home the desired Engineering Inspiration award, which commends exceptional success in “advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school or organization and community.”
Team #1807 was formed in 2006 and is comprised of 50 students. There are seven divisions that make up the team: Design, Machining, Build, Electrical, Programming, Strategy and Business. The team is mentored by Mr. Robert Tackett, an engineering teacher at Allentown High School and Mr. Matthew Jasaitis, a physics teacher.