Congratulations to Westwood Robotics 1757 who competed at the University of New Hampshire this year with the robot that they built! Megan McDonald ('22) explained their robot, the event, and the team's strategy:
Our robot (named Rampothy) can expand into a ramp to allow other members of our alliance to reach higher levels of the HAB platform, which consists of three different platforms of varying heights. The higher the level the robot climbs to on the HAB platform the more points scored. Our robot also can act as a defensive bot which works to block out other bots and prevent them from scoring points. We were selected by one of the top eight teams to participate in the quarterfinals where we were on an alliance with one other ramp bot and another both that was focused on placing cargo and hatch panels to score more points. Our strategy was to have our bot go up onto the first level of the platform and act as a ramp allowing for the second ramp bot to climb up onto the third platform and for the third bot to then climb onto the second ramp bot which allowed us to have two robots on the third level of the platform scoring us a lot of points. We were also able to keep our own ramp bot on the first level scoring us even more points. After completing this never before seen maneuver we gained massive popularity throughout the FRC (First Robotics Competition) world and even ended up trending as #1 on the FRC subreddit and a picture of our robot on the HAB platform was posted on First robotics official Instagram where it gained over 5,600 likes.