- Philip Thibodeau
- 4 days ago
Last Saturday, Southington High School’s robotics team, the CyberKnights, had just returned home from a dramatic tournament victory in Vermont, where they and two other teams in their alliance eeked out a close win in overtime against a rival trio of teams. And they were just days away from another competition, the New England District Championships, to be held at the Big E in Massachusetts.
You might assume that the team would be content to use the same machine that had given them their win - and for which they won an ‘Excellence in Engineering’ award.
If so, you may not be familiar with the team’s focus on continuous improvement, or ‘iteration,’ as they call it. On a sunny afternoon, the CyberKnights were hard at work in their shop at Mohawk Northeast rebuilding two of the robot’s main components. Six team members took a short break from their tinkering to explain what they were working on – and introduce themselves.
Senior Jack Beauchemin: “The robot’s name is Big Daddy. I’m the driver.”
Junior Luke Schuster: “I mainly help with the design. During the competition, I’m the pit lead. I make sure everything stays organized and fix the robot if there are any issues.”
Junior Alex Schuster: “During the match I’m the operator, which means I stand next to Jack while he’s driving. There are a few buttons I hit once in a while, but the main thing I’m doing is just yelling at Jack to tell him what to do. Back here I help with the design of the robot.”
Freshman Parvathi Krishna: “I’m on mechanical and business.”
Sophomore Rosalina Santoro: “I do a lot of the powder coating for the robot, and I also help with electrical. The powder coating is a system that we use for dyeing metal, in a sense. We hang it in a box and apply the powder, which is magnetic, so it sticks. Then you put it in the oven at 400 degrees for ten minutes. It sets, changing the color of the robot. I focus on that along with electrical.”
Senior Ananya Rajeev: “I’m one of the mechanical leads along with Alex. We manage all the machines and make sure everything is working and being made. At competition, I’m one of the technicians, pushing the cart, dealing with the batteries and such.”
The challenge set for the various teams this season is to build a robot that can scoop up yellow balls from the floor and shoot as many as possible into a hoop in a given amount of time. This video from their last tournament shows what the robots look like in action:
On Saturday the CyberKnights were making a pair of changes to Big Daddy. “This is the hopper that holds all the balls,” Rajeev explained, pointing to a bin in the back of the machine. “Last weekend the hopper was mainly made of polyclear, but that was causing us a lot of problems: it was really flimsy and it was breaking a lot. So we switched and made these walls from self-reinforced polypropylene (SRPP). They’re a lot stiffer, but they’re able to flex and take the impact, so it’s not going to break as often.”
Luke Schuster described what that would mean during competition: “When you’re going for the balls at the same time as all the other teams, you’re going to collide. We switched to SRPP, which absorbs that impact. We changed the material but we also changed the geometry.”
“First we implement all those changes,” he added, “then we test it on the field, and see if it works. If it doesn’t, we implement some more changes until we get to a spot where we are happy.”
Rajeev pointed to a collection of machine tools in the back of the shop at Mohawk: “We have our CNC router back there. We machine a lot of our big parts that way. We have a lot of machines, and a lot of parts are made by the students.”
Another adjustment involved the motors that feed the balls from the hopper into the shooter.
“Our first event this season was Western New England,” Santoro explained. “The difference between Western and our last event is our robot’s drum shooter. After WNE we wanted a better shooter, so we put in a drum shooter which maximizes our cycle time.” This photo shows the drum shooter on the robot:
Luke put the difference in numbers: “The old shooter allows us to shoot 15 balls per second, and our new shooter allows us to shoot 25 balls per second. Since we have a higher feed rate with our motors, we now have to reprogram for that rate.”
When they head up to the Big E Thursday, the CyberKnights hope that these adjustments will pay off in better scores. The pressure is on, since they know that the competition will also have spent the week ‘iterating.’
Drama in Vermont
The team’s most recent competition at the University of Vermont in Burlington was a hard-fought contest with many tense moments. A CyberKnights press release explains how the action went during finals, when each team picks two other teams to partner with in an ‘alliance’:
“The CyberKnights finished the qualification rounds in a strong third place. However, the atmosphere shifted during alliance selection, when the top two ranked teams in the event—The Bucks’ Wrath (Bucksport, ME) and the Nutrons (Boston, MA)—decided to join forces. This "super-alliance" created a formidable opponent that many assumed would cruise to an easy victory.”
“Undeterred, the CyberKnights captained the second-seeded alliance, partnering with The Outliers (Portland, ME) and Tidal Shock, a standout rookie team from Barre, VT. The ensuing playoffs were a masterclass in perseverance and underestimation. Refusing to make it easy for the top-seeded teams, the Southington students and their partners delivered a performance that proved you can never count the CyberKnights out until the final buzzer sounds.”
“The playoffs were a whirlwind of high-velocity, high-stakes action with the CyberKnights’ alliance defeating the top seeds, sending them to the lower bracket. The powerhouses met again in the finals for a series of edge of your seat matches. After losing the first match and rebounding to clinch the second, the tension peaked in a third-match tie. This forced the competition into a fourth, overtime tiebreaker - the first of its kind in New England this season.”
“In the final moments of overtime, the CyberKnights and their partners surged forward to secure the gold. The victory was especially historic for their rookie partners, Tidal Shock, who earned their first prestigious “Blue Banner” in their inaugural season.”
To make matters even more dramatic, there was an error in the posting of the scores which led the Cyberknights to believe that they had won, one round before they actually did.
“The tie match was kind of crazy,” Beauchemin said. “The way that they display the scores, it shows the alliance that wins first, and then the score. It originally said that the our alliance won. But it was actually the scores from finals round two. So we were thinking that we had just won the competition. They told us they were the wrong scores, then it displayed as a tie.”
After results from the District Championships are tallied, the top 32 teams from New England will go to the World Championships in Houston. Southington is optimistic that they will qualify, based on their performance so far this season, but they're taking nothing for granted.
Every improvement they make gives them a competitive advantage but also entails more expenses for materials. The CyberKnights' fundraising wing is currently seeking contributions from individuals or corporations to help cover those costs.
