Fox Chapel Area High School robotics team named 'grand champion' in national competition

Fox Chapel Area High School teacher Ryan Siniawski knew his robotics students were winners.

They now have the national hardware to prove it.

The team of 15 students from freshmen to seniors was named the overall grand champion in the ’Burgh Bash National Championships hosted by the BotsIQ manufacturing workforce program.

They overcame an opening day mechanical failure of their 15-pound bot, Knockback, and went 9-0 in the battle portion of the tournament May 19-20 at Rosedale Technical College in Kennedy Township.

Their fighting prowess, combined with the team’s engineering document scores, earned them the championship.

“Their hundreds of hours of work as a second-year design outlasted many teams with over a decade of revisions and experience under their belts,” Siniawski said.

Thirty-eight teams competed, including some from California and Kansas.

Junior Eduardo Phelan-Vidal is Fox Chapel Area’s lead designer and robotics club president.

“I am immensely proud of our team’s performance as a whole,” he said. “The shock we felt when they announced that we had won grand champion was like getting hit by a bus. Going into this competition, few of us actually expected to win, especially considering that this was our first year running a battlebot with a weapon.”

Knockback featured a spinning kinetic energy weapon, utilizing a three-pound piece of stainless steel called a “beater bar” that spins at about 15,000 revolutions per minute.

Phelan-Vidal said the rpms are 10 times as fast as a typical airplane propeller.

“We maneuver the spinning weapon into enemy bots, using it to fling them around and smash them to pieces,” he said. “Knockback is also one of the fastest and most maneuverable bots in the entire competition, enabling us to out-drive enemy bots and avoid their hits.”

Phelan-Vidal also credited Siniawski’s guidance, assistance from industry sponsor Pittsburgh-based Aerotech Inc. and the team’s “don’t give up” strategy as keys to its success.

The team began designing the robot around the start of the school year, according to club vice president and driver Adam Zimmerman.

“We made three prototypes out of nylon and 3D printed materials to help us figure out how we would set up wiring for the robot,” the senior said. “In March, we received the metal version of the robot. I spent more than two hours every day working on things that were related to the robot.

“The most challenging part of building the robot was designing it so it would be able to remove damaged parts without having to take the whole robot apart after every battle.

“I’ve really learned how to work as a team, and that everyone has good ideas to contribute to the project so we can find the best solutions.”

Students used computer-aided design, or CAD, as part of the refining process after a prototype was developed.

“This skill is particularly useful in a mechanical engineering career,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful, complex or perfect a design may be. At the end of the day, it’s just a design — data in an electronic file, an image on a screen. A part will never be real if it cannot be made, a design will never be realized if it cannot be manufactured.”

Other team members are seniors Aiden Dorneich, Kevin Quinn and Samuel Kuhns; juniors Ava McCaffrey, Aiden Purcell and Lucy Rygelski; sophomores Jackson Hagler, Riley Puklus, Graeson Santucci and Keegan Scanlon; and freshmen Benjamin Sun, Krisztian Salvador and Alanna Sloss.

The team qualified for the national competition after it participated in the BotsIQ State Finals Competition, held at PennWest California at the end of April, where it won second place in engineering documentation with a near-perfect score.