On Friday 28th February and Saturday 1st March, the Cranleigh Robotics team took part in the VEX Robotics National Championship held at the International Centre in Telford. The team qualified for the Nationals as one of the top 40 teams in the country and put their robot to the test in both teamwork and individual skills matches. The team built and developed their robot as part of their A-Level Design Engineering course and faced tough competition from experienced teams across both days of the competition. Day one started with qualification matches for the teamwork competition and continued through to Saturday’s knockout matches as the teams battled it out to become overall champions. The Cranleigh Robotics team were ranked 26th out of 40 heading into the alliance selection for the knockout rounds and after forming the 13th ranked alliance they face tough competition against the 5th ranked alliance in the round of 16. After a tense game, the Cranleigh team narrowly missed out on the quarter-finals but gave a strong performance nonetheless. In the individual “skills” side of the competition the team put both their driver and programming skills to the test. With a maximum of three sixty second runs at both driver and programming, the top score for each team would be added to the leaderboard. The Cranleigh team secured an impressive 16th place in the leaderboard after their six timed runs.
This impressive performance did not go unnoticed by the judges who awarded the Cranleigh Robotics team with the Judges Award. The judges were incredibly impressed with how competitive the Cranleigh robot was, considering they had only been working with the VEX system and developing their robot for six months. The majority of the competitor teams had at least three years of experience and to be performing so well in a short amount of time, backing their performance up with a clear understanding of the mechanisms and systems deployed in the robot, the judges felt this had to be recognised. Congratulations to the team on securing further success for Cranleigh School at a National level.
