Team 5587 is ready to react
Abigail Ernst
Editor
The Titan Robotics team, FRC 5587, is kicking off their 7th season with the FIRST Robotics Competition this year. The robotics team was founded in 2015 and is an official VHSL sport. Each season starts off in January when the official game for the season is announced. The January kickoff immediately leads into the build season that goes to March. Competition season starts in early March and goes into mid-April depending on how the team performs.
In 2019, the team won the Chesapeake District’s “Engineering Inspiration” Award and went to the FIRST Championship in Detroit, Michigan. Due to COVID, there have not been any regular season competitions in three years.
The team is split into two sub-teams, a non-technical and a technical team, within these two sub-teams, there are four subsections. The non-technical section consists of Fundraising, Outreach, Marketing, and Awards, which focuses on getting grants to fund the team, winning awards at competitions, and reaching out to the community to promote STEM. The technical section focuses on the actual design and construction of the robot and consists of the Mechanical, Electrical, Programming, and Safety teams. The team uses ACHS’s metal and wood shops and equipment they have purchased to fabricate custom parts and build the robot.
However, building robots is not the only thing the team does. President Virginia Arnold said, “Our team has a larger mission of spreading STEM throughout the community, which we achieve by helping younger robotics teams, participating in outreach events, running summer camps, and more.”
This year the competition game is called Rapid Reacts. The main goal is to shoot as many balls into an 8-foot basket during the 2 minutes and 30-second match. However, the first 15 seconds of each game is an autonomous period, meaning no driver is allowed to control the robot, it all has to be pre-programmed code. After the autonomous period is over, the teams try to score as many points as possible with the drivers’ control, and within the last 30 seconds, teams try to climb monkey bars to gain more points.
Outreach Lead Nicholas Kruse said, “This season I’m most excited for our competition, it’s been almost 3 years since our last regular-season competition and I can’t wait to see the difference in how well our team is able to perform.”
The robots are different each year but the team learns from every previous robot they have made. “This year, we are custom designing every element of the robot, taking some inspiration from robots from previous years. We look at what succeeded for other teams in the past in similar games, and base some of our designs off of that,” said Programming Lead Isabel Cruz Rivera.
The team is currently meeting in E132 every week, Tuesday through Saturday. If you have any questions, you can contact frc5587@gmail.com.
