The Paly Robotics team continues to kick around the competition, reaching the semifinals this weekend, March 19 to 20, at the FIRST Regional.

After coming off a successful semifinal showing at a competition with a similar event in Portland, Ore., the team faced off with 49 other Bay Area high school teams at the San Jose State University Event Center. A team from Bellarmine College Preparatory won the tournament.

The team constructed a robot and competed in the main event, “Breakaway,” in which two opposing sides squared off with custom-built robots in a game similar to soccer. Every match, three teams combine to form an alliance, and the teams work together to beat their opponents. For a more detailed explanation of the game, click here for an animation.

Senior John Xia, club president and captain of the team, felt very content with the team’s showing at the past two tournaments. The team led its alliance for a few matches.

“We made it to semis in both competitions, and we were alliance captains this year,” Xia said. “I’m pretty satisfied. I would have liked to win semis over the top ranked alliance, but clearly that didn’t happen.”

Players drove robots in a special arena that tested the technical skill of the robot designers. Builders had to account for bumps in the middle of the arena, which could overturn robots that traveled over them. One point was awarded for each goal scored by a robot.

At the end of each match, teams had the opportunity to maneuver their robots to perform certain tasks in the middle of the arena, such as lifting themselves onto a platform. Points were awarded to teams whose robots were successful in completing these tasks.

According to team member junior Eamon Winden, Paly’s initial strategy in Portland was not centered on these minor missions, as the team earned only a small amount of points relative to the points received in the actual game.

“We focused on scoring, because we didn’t think that the extra two points were important enough,” Winden said. “We worked to get high scoring matches.”

Most of the time, this strategy paid dividends, according to Winden. In one match from the Portland tournament, the team and other members of its alliance outscored an opposing group of teams 13 to nine, and in the process they scored the entire competition’s highest single match point total.

However, at the FIRST tournament, the team shifted gears to concentrate more on defense by taking advantage of the arena, Xia said. The strategy worked, at least in the pre-elimination rounds, according to Abhishek Sriraman, president of the Robotics Club at Saint Francis High School in Mountain View.

“Palo Alto’s clever strategy, which was overlooked by many other teams, gave them an edge in this competition and helped them work their way to the semifinals,” Sriraman said.

As Paly’s alliance entered the elimination rounds, the team stuck to the general strategy of shutting down its opponent’s offense. Looking back at the results, Xia regretted that decision.

“I feel like we would have had a better shot at winning had I stepped back and re-evaluated our strategy right,” Xia said. “We played a lot of heavy defense, and didn’t emphasize scoring enough.”

During the tournament itself, many members of the Paly team were absent either due to sickness or other unspecified reasons, Xia mentioned. For most of the tournament, Xia was one of the absentees, having to communicate by phone with the team while battling a fever at home during most of the competition. Leading the team during the time were senior captains Rasmus Rossen and Nick Clayton, Paly alumnus and Stanford University student Daniel Shaffer, and Winden. Shaffer filled in for Xia’s position as the drive coach, whose job is to determine the match strategy.

“Daniel captained the team in 2008,” Xia said. “He was the drive coach when I wasn’t there. That’s my normal position in matches and, coincidetally, the only one that can be held by a non-high school [student].”

Xia also said that, like any other competitive activity, much of the team’s success relied on the preparation put in before the actual tournament. According to Winden, the team had a six week building season during which team members constructed their robot. Winden cited many new technologies that the team found exciting and helpful.

“We got a new machine [called the tormach] which allowed us to look into a whole new design,” Winden said. “[It is] a machine that cuts metal into designs from a computer.”

Both Winden and Xia agreed that for many robotics teams, the amount of material, technology available, and thought put into the robot’s design play decisive factors in the design and ultimate success of the team. For example, the team from Bellarmine, which beat Paly in the semifinals on its way to winning the tournament championship, conducts its work in lab located within the NASA Ames Research Center, according to Xia.

“The Bellarmine team works out of the NASA Ames machine shop and consistently turns out really good robots,” Xia said. “I think they’ve won every SVR they’ve been to.”

“A lot of teams get sponsorships from companies with machine shops,” Xia added. “We have a pretty nice machine shop ourselves.”

To cover expenses, the Paly robotics team also has many sponsors that supply money and material, according to Winden.

“Alan Steel in Redwood City is a big sponsor of ours,” Winden said. “ACE Hardware, Spot Pizza and Boeing are also all sponsors.”

While the team has competed very well at its past two tournaments, it did not make the national tournament. Thus, the team’s focus has shifted from competitions to recruiting for the next year.

“I think they’ll do pretty well next year,” Xia said. “The guys who’ll be in charge are already stepping up and figuring out their plans. They’ll be doing a lot of recruiting.”

Winden concurred, “We will be severely understaffed next year and would love for people to come by and help out.”