Robotics have best finish ever at Cowtown Throwdown

John Ostermann, Online Editor-in-Chief

Metal clashing against metal, robots flying around the course grabbing for the gears and fuel trying to gain the most points. At Cowtown Throwdown two days were full of robotic action as alliances of three teams competed against each other to gain the most points, which are awarded by collecting fuel, gears, and climbing the rope to finish the game.

“Each match has an autonomous section where our robot moves without us controlling it, then we’d operate our robot to collect gears that get dropped into the arena and hook them onto springs,” senior Luann Jung said. “The most points comes from climbing a rope at the end of each match, so our team usually focuses on that and defense.”

The Cyborg Indians finished in 17th place for the tournament. They really picked up the pace on Saturday after a slow start to Friday, ending it in 42nd place.

“[On] Friday night, a lot of misfortunes occurred that prevented us from doing our best,” Jung said. “But then Saturday we worked really well each time problems arose and were able to make it back up to 17th place.”

Unfortunately the Cyborg Indians did not make the playoff, in which the top eight teams selected three other teams to compete with them. Manhattan was not selected to compete.

“[17] is by far the best ranking we’ve ended with,” junior Seth Higgins said. “But then we didn’t get chosen to play in the playoff matches, which was kind of a bummer.”

A lot of preparation went into creating the robot, each member had to put in around 50 hours of afterschool work over a three month building period. The competition is announced in early January giving teams roughly three months of preparation time. In most cases the Cowtown Throwdown uses the same thing as the spring competition of the previous year so teams have the opportunity to improve on their robots.

“Most of the work we had to do was on replacing parts that had gone bad,” Higgins said.

The high paced environment makes for an exciting environment as the 50 teams all scramble to make repairs to their bots after the matches, trying to get them in the best shape for the next match.

“It was all very hectic,” Jung said. “Each match is only two minutes and thirty seconds, so it’s really high pressure and there’s a lot of quick decisions that need to be made about what to focus on in a match depending on our allied teams’ weaknesses and our opposing alliances’ strengths.”

This first competition will lead the Cyborg Indians into the rest of the year. They will compete in Lawrence Nov. 11 and then will compete in the official Greater Kansas City Regional that the team will be building an entirely new robot for.

“Our team is more cohesive now,” Jung said. “We have experience working together now. Every year the team is different so it’s good to get to know each other and understand how to cooperate to get things done.”