ABOVE: Fairmont High School senior and robotics member, Isaac Stone, demonstrates what the completed robot will need to do during this year’s robotics season. Currently they are working on several prototypes for how to best meet the challenge, which is to scoop up dozens of balls at a time, drive over a sharp hill and shoot the balls into an open hoop.

FAIRMONT – As a brand new game has been selected for robotics teams across the country, Fairmont Robotics is looking to keep its hot streak going.

Last year, Fairmont Robotics finished first at the Duluth Lake Superior Regional competition, beating over 100 teams and earning themselves a spot at Worlds in Houston, Texas. They also got to plead their case for two STEM-related builds, earning real-world experience.

This year, senior Isaac Stone said the game is different from previous years in that it involves something riskier than previous years: shooting a ball.

“We’re taking a bunch of these yellow spherical balls, about six inches in diameter,” he said. “The goal is to shoot as many of those as possible to that [basket] over there. Start of each three-minute match, they’re gonna have about 300 to 400 of them waiting in the middle of the field. In the last 20 seconds, you’re expected to have your robot climb onto a set of pull-up bars as high as you can.”

The robot will also need to traverse over a triangle ramp to reach the shooting zone. The biggest thing Stone said is different this year is the scale at which participants are expected to succeed.

“Last year you were supposed to [place] one [PVC pipe] at a time,” he said. “This year you’ll see teams that will do them 50 to 80 balls at a time.”

To match this challenge, Stone said they are trying to make sure their bot can carry as many balls as possible while also being efficient at picking them off the ground and shooting them.

“If one of those is inefficient, then that’s the weakest link in the chain, and you’ll be limited by that,” he said.

It is still fairly early in the season, so while they don’t have a working robot yet, senior Wylee Fredricksen said they are hard at work figuring out their game plan.

“We’ve been doing a little bit of prototyping,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot more of CAD base, computer side of it, but we’re trying to get down to our final archetype so we can start truly prototyping and getting to something that’s going to look more like our final robot.”

So far they have had great success with their ball intake, but for the final climbing piece, they have not yet found a suitable mechanism. Stone said from past experience and success, he has found that simplicity can be a key piece for success.

“If you choose a design that’s more complicated, more complicated designs come with more issues,” he said. “As a team, we aren’t one of the top 100 elite teams in the world that are ready to tackle all of these issues. As long as we stay within our own reach, we’ll have a lot of success.”

Co-Head Mentor Aaron Perkins said with the combination of new and veteran team members, this team has done a great job thus far.

“They’ve really learned to work together,” he said. “They could be a little more efficient at times, but realistically, they all try. They are all working towards a common goal. It’s really exciting to see.”

While the team members have never seen this game before, Perkins said he has seen elements of it as a mentor going back to 2016. When it comes to having that knowledge and knowing when it’s best to assist his players, Perkins said it can be tough to balance.

“It’s difficult not to be heavy-handed in it because you have ideas of how it could be solved, but realistically, you want to step back and let the students figure it out and have more ownership of it,” he said. “It’s more of a gentle guiding.”

As they look forward in the season, Stone said he feels like they are at an eight out of 10 for the direction they are heading. For their first meet in March, Fredericksen said they are hoping to take away more accurate data than in previous years and get good information from their scouters who look at other teams and their builds.