Most competitive robotics teams would consider a robot held together by duct tape and zip ties as a sign of defeat. But for Manhattan High’s Little Apple Cyborgs, it was the secret to a Regional championship. The Cyborgs competed at the Oklahoma Regional on March 5-8 for their first competition of the season. They overcame broken parts and a literal sabotage attempt to take first place.
The team’s robot, nicknamed “Slime,” is painted green and covered in googly eyes. Slime is a complex machine with seven main parts, including a rotating turret. However, the design struggled during early matches. The intake bent, gears slipped and the shooter was ripped off the robot several times. Because the robot was struggling to score, senior drivers Syoma Zharkov and Mason Gish changed their strategy to heavy defense, using the robot to block out the opponents.
“A valid strategy is going out and sliming out the other bot,” Zharkov said. “And so since we could drive pretty well, we went over and we slimed out the other bot, and we did really good. We prevented a lot of scoring.”
The team also dealt with, as the team called it, “Sodagate” after a member of another team accidentally dropped a can of soda into the Cyborgs’ robot. Despite the sticky mess the electronics stayed safe. Junior Will Schmidt, the electrical leader, said the robot had no electrical failures. Schmidt was also named a finalist for the FIRST Leadership Award, the fourth year in a row a Manhattan student has won the award.
“Sodagate, that was a conspiracy against us, because every other team was tired of us winning, and they were trying to sabotage us, because apparently they said that we were a rock,” Schmidt said. “They were just trying to kill competition, and they knew that they couldn’t do it themselves, so they had to sabotage somebody, and it was sadly us.”
After the first round of matches, the Little Apple Cyborgs were ranked 14th out of 46 teams. They weren’t drafted for an alliance (team of three teams) at first and began to pack up their tools, but when a robot in the top alliance broke, the Little Apple Cyborgs were called as a substitute. Playing alongside two other teams — the Ratchet Rockers and the Botbusters, the Little Apple Cyborgs used their defensive skills to help the alliance sweep the finals and win the regional.
“Coming off of our previous year’s success, we thought we were going to do pretty well at the start, our practice matches and early qualification matches, started to kind of hurt our hopes,” senior Dawson Raw said. “It was a bit rocky, and our robot was not performing the best. We had a lot of mechanical failures, and so got our hopes down a little bit, but the team persevered, and we ended up winning.”
The Little Apple Cyborgs will now need to perform well in Kansas City on April 8-11 to qualify for the World Championships.
“Something we do need to work on between now and Kansas City is simplifying some of our mechanisms and making it easier to work on,” Raw said. “So that when mechanisms do break, we can change them out quickly and get back onto the field to go and slime out the other robots.”