By Maya Kostov

Do you know how ASU’s slogan is “#1 in innovation”? Well Tempe Prep‘s High School Robotics team is going to give ASU a run for its money soon. The club had three teams involved in the ASU 3 pound Battlebots competition, and team “Roomba” won 2nd place overall out of 13 teams! Two other teams were led by Junior Daniel Tsark and Sophomore Marzuk Hasan.

All of the other 10 teams were college teams, and one built by adults. The robot took about 10 hours to build, with basically the entire base of the robot was 3D printed! Senior Jordan Ehmann was the leader, Junior Andre Chavez was the driver, and Junior Jordan Rodriquez was the pit crew. Jordan E. designed all of the 3D printed parts through software, and both Jordan E and Andre soldered all of the electronics off of Amazon, those electronics being motors, motor controllers, receivers, batteries, etc. Each robot had a max budget of $300, but Roomba cost under $200 to build!

The objective of this Battlebots competition is to destroy the opponent, so several robots had weapons to destroy opponents. Team Roomba decided they would take a more defensive approach and make their robot be a simple wedge. That way, their opponents would end up destroying themselves and it proved to be very effective.

Andre points out that “This is a very important success to our team because this project was entirely spearheaded by students; there was almost no mentor help throughout our process.”

This event was a great team building experience as well as great practice for their real FIRST Robotics competition in early April. Keep working Knights!