Caledon students have great showing at FIRST robotics world championships

By Zachary Roman

A talented group of Caledon students has proven they are top dogs in the world of robotics.

The Alpha Dogs (Team 4946) are a FIRST robotics team from Humberview Secondary School in Bolton. FIRST stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”. 

David Hilgendorff is a teacher at Humberview and a mentor for the Alpha Dogs. He explained there were over 40 students on the team this year.

On the first Saturday of every January, FIRST robotics teams around the world are given a challenge, then have six weeks to design and build a robot that will be able to meet this challenge and be better and faster at it than other robots in competition.

“It's a big team effort… It's a crazy hectic six weeks,” said Hilgendorff.

There's a business team, programming team, design team, build team, and media team within the Alpha Dogs. 

The challenge given to robotics teams this year was to build a robot that could score two types of game pieces, a pylon and an inflatable cube. The robot had to be able to pick up and place a pilon onto a pole, and be able to pick up and place a cube into a box. It also had to be very nimble to move around the playing field quickly, and be able to balance on a platform that moved like a seesaw.

Hilgendorff said the Alpha Dogs excelled this year because the robot they made was not only great at picking up and using both game pieces, but it was reliable too.

“One of our biggest things this year was consistency,” said Hilgendorff. “Our robot consistently was able to complete the tasks… even the best robot in the world broke down in the playoffs at [the world championships] and we were really good at not breaking.”

The Alpha Dogs were very good at being diligent in checking over their robot and diagnosing any potential problems with it. Hilgendorff recalled one moment at the world championships when the Alpha Dogs' robot was not connecting to its controller right before a match.

“The students ran out on the field and tore the covers off and looked around and were able to, within two or three minutes, diagnose and fix the problem,” said Hilgendorff.  “As mentors that made us very proud, because it was a great example of how well the students knew that robot.”

The Ontario FIRST robotics provincial championships were held in Hamilton this year, from April 5 to 8. The Alpha Dogs won the division they were placed in with a record of 15-2-0, and also won an “Innovation in Control” award. This earned them a spot in the provincial finals, where the team lost on what Hilgendorff called a “controversial red card.”

FIRST robotics teams compete in alliances, groups of three teams. One of the Alpha Dogs' alliance partners accidentally bumped into an opposing robot, knocking it over. The referees deemed the collision to be intentional, “even though everybody could see it wasn't intentional,” said Hilgendorff. 

Regardless of the mishap in the finals match, Hilgendorff said it was an amazingly successful tournament for the Alpha Dogs and it earned them a place in the world championships, which were held in Houston, Texas from April 19 to 22.

At the FIRST robotics world championships, the Alpha Dogs had a 10-5-0 record. There were 940 teams from around the world competing at the world championships. With around 15 people per team, there were close to 15,000 student competitors in attendance.

“They have eight divisions, eight separate competition fields running at one time. The way it works is that you compete in randomly assigned groups of three robots, until you get to a point called alliance selection, at which point teams pick who they want to play with, based on performance during the qualification matches,” said Hilgendorff. “We were lucky to get picked by the first-place team in our group to form the number one alliance on our field.”

At that point, a round robin tournament began and the Alpha Dogs remained in the winners bracket as their games were going well. They defeated the number five alliance, who went to the losers bracket and found success there. 

Soon, the two teams met again in the finals of their division. Unfortunately, by this time, one of the Alpha Dogs' partners' robots had broken apart. 

“The alliance that we had been previously defeated an hour or two earlier, ended up beating us and then going on to the… absolute final… and played against the number one team and narrowly lost to them,” said Hilgendorff. “To put it in a sort of simple way, we beat the team that narrowly came in second place.”

You never know what will happen at the world championships, said Hilgendorff, and it's such a hard tournament to win because so much has to go right. He explained that even a team that had the number one robot in the world had an unlucky breakdown in the first round and got knocked out. This is one of the reasons Hilgendorff is so proud of how consistent the Alpha Dogs' robot — which is named Hammerhead — was this year.

“It's definitely the best season for our team ever, it was pretty exciting,” said Hilgendorff. “We can hold our hands high knowing that we competed with the best in the world.”

The Alpha Dogs have been competing for ten years now, and are very thankful for their sponsors such as Bolton Rotary, Husky, and Canadian Tire. The Alpha Dogs also benefited from a new partnership this year with the Albion Bolton Agricultural Society.

The Society allowed the Alpha Dogs to practice in one of their large buildings at the fairgrounds in Bolton. Hilgendorff said before that, the team never had a dedicated practice space.

“You need a space pretty much like half the size of a hockey rink in order to drive these robots around,” said Hilgendorff, noting Hammerhead weighs 125 pounds. “The Agricultural Society letting us use their building this winter has really helped us be able to progress.”

For more information about the Alpha Dogs, their sponsors, and to see the team in action, those interested can visit 4946.ca.