Robotics Team Heads to Championship

March 20, 2019 - 11:47 AM

Mt. SAC’s award-winning robotics team is heading to the VEX Robotics World Championship in April after recently taking home honors at a regional tournament.

The team will travel to Louisville, Kentucky and take on other colleges and universities from across the world. The event allows students to channel their passion for science, technology, engineering and math – and love of robotics.

 “They will be going up against people and bots they’ve never seen before in terms of performance, design and programming,” said Eugene Mahmoud, physics and engineering professor. “It’s kind of a fun open bag, a Pandora’s box.”

The VEX Robotics World Championship brings together qualifying teams from elementary and middle schools, as well as colleges and universities. Teams, with two robots each, compete on a 12-foot-by-12-foot playing surface. They try to outscore their opponents through a variety of maneuvers involving flipping over caps, hitting flags with balls, lifting caps onto posts and climbing a podium.

Mahmoud said about 18 team members participated in the regional competition, playing a variety of roles including driving, coaching and programming the robots, and scouting other teams.

This year’s regional competition was significantly more challenging, he said, because VEX Robotics decided after more than a decade to change the types of microprocessors and motors that were required. The change forced all teams to learn a modified version of the programming language and made it impossible for teams to use the same design they had used in previous years.

Mt. SAC has been competing in regional VEX robotics competitions for about 15 years and has previously sent at least one team to world competition in 10 of those years.  Last year, the Mt. SAC team placed eighth among 84 teams, achieving its highest ranking so far.

Mt. SAC’s performance is especially rewarding, Mahmoud said, because the teams are going up against major universities that have larger facilities and more resources to devote to their engineering programs.

The robotics course is the only non-transferable course in Mt. SAC’s engineering program and has no prerequisites. Mahmoud said the intention is to attract anyone who is interested in robotics, whether they watch “BattleBots,” a robot combat television series, and like that level of competition and strategy or they want to pursue a career in engineering. 

“We get a lot of students who want to transfer to Cal Poly Pomona, USC and Berkeley and they need practical experience,” Mahmoud said.  “We feel like this competition gives students that exposure. It’s among one of many valuable things we can offer at the community college level.”