By: Nathaniel de Sam Lazaro

On Saturday, December 7th, Highland Park’s robotics team, the Automatons, competed in the MinneTrials robotics competition.

MinneTrials is a competition hosted by team 2239, Technocrats, in Hopkins. The robots are built for a game separate from the one used in the main competition season, which occurs from January to April each year. These robots are constructed by first and second year members of the team, while third and fourth year students serve as mentors. This is designed to teach newer students the skills necessary to work on a robot once the older students have graduated.

The competition was hosted in the gym of L.H. Tanglen Elementary, which is located next to Hopkins High School. Ten teams competed, though two teams had multiple robots, so the total number of robots competing was twelve.

The game consisted of 21 qualification matches, with alliances of two robots competing against each other. This meant that each robot competed in approximately every third match. Prior to the qualification matches, there were also two rounds of practice matches.

Our team won one of our two practice matches, but there was some confusion over the rules of the game.

Unfortunately, the rest of the competition was met with technical issues that had to do with our robot. In one match, the robot emergency stopped for thirty seconds.  In another, we realized that the laptop we had planned to use to control the robot had not been charged.

In the end, we ended up losing all but one of our qualification matches, and were ranked tenth out of twelve.

After the qualification matches, the top four teams were able to pick another team to form playoff alliances. Unfortunately, we were not picked to compete in the playoffs.

While the competition did not go as we had hoped, we are glad to have learned from the experience. After the competition, our team had a meeting to discuss what happened and the general consensus seemed to be that the first and second year students were glad to have had this experience. This was our first year competing in the competition, and we are planning to return next year and hope for a better result.