The USC Robotics Team photo, back row, left to right: Justin Riddler, Holden Allard, Brody Winstead, Brody Walker, Cayden Stern, Jerome Young, and Luther Woodring; front row, left to right: Nathan Mullary, Taylor Karaba, Colsen Mullary, Savanna Edwards and Jada Goldman. Not pictured, Noah Hartman, Bailey Peterson and Raja Sojo.

The United South Central High School Robotics team has just completed another successful year.

In fact, last Tuesday after school some of the team members were busy taking apart one of the robots the group had constructed this year.

“It is a little sad,” team member Noah Hartman said about taking the robot completely apart. “But this is the fourth one I helped build and compete with and then take apart.”

This was the ninth year for a robotics team at USC.

“We started in the fall of 2017,” says the team’s coach, Doug Sahr. “We start every year in August, before school starts and go until March or April.”

This year there were four teams of four each at USC. Two were varsity teams and two were junior varsity. Besides coach Sahr, Donn Browne is the assistant coach and Jada Goldman is the team manager.

“As coaches we guide the team members,” Sahr says. “But we don’t assist them in constructing the robot and we don’t coach them from the sidelines telling them what to do during a meet. They do all this by themselves, without our help.”

This year the teams competed in four meets and the State Meet. The four were at Southland High School in November, Minnesota State University – Mankato over Christmas break, USC High School in February, and at Albert Lea. Then they competed at the State Meet at the end of the season.

The last meet is called Worlds, and it is in St. Louis this year. The USC team did not qualify for Worlds.

“We have never been to Worlds,” Hartman says. “But it is always a goal.

The competition is fierce, in several ways.

“You are judged on coding, and on the assembly of the robot,” Hartman says. “And then, of course, on driving it.”

The team has to keep an engineering notebook of all the things they did to build the robot. That includes things that did not work, and what they did to fix the problems.

The driving competition is fast and furious – and short.

The robot has to operate its self autonomously (by computer) for 18 seconds, and then a driver/operator has one minute and 45 seconds to accomplish the task.

That task is different every year. This year it was to have the robot pick up cubes and then put them in a tube.

Each team competing has its own color of cubes to pick up and deposit into the goals. And the cubes are all located at different levels – some a quarter of an inch high up to 14 inches off the floor. And there are speed bumps to get over.

Plus, the opponents robot might have an arm that extends out – called a doinker – that can disrupt the other team’s cubes in the pipe (goal).

Hartman showed how the doinker works. Plus how the robot itself works.

“It is a 10-wheel drive train,” he points out. “They can do 200 rotations per minute and the motor can do 333 rpm.”

So it is fast. Can turn on a dime. And accomplish a lot of different tasks.

There are rules, Sahr explains. It has to be a certain size, it has to be constructed out of certain parts from manufacturers and no 3-D printed parts.

The USC Robotics Team builds the robots in the STEM room at the school. In the classroom there are bins of parts, lots of tools and a few trophies from past competitions.

But no robots from the past. All are taken apart at the end of the season. In fact, sometimes that is during the season, when a new robot is created for the next competition that might do better.

Some of the students – and the coaches – are hoping that a possible new addition to the USC school building will include space for the robotics team to work.

“We had our test field (where the team practices with the robots) in the wrestling room for a while,” Sahr says. “Then we moved to a space upstairs, but the fire marshal made us leave that area, calling it unsafe. Now we are in a small area behind the stage in the auditorium.”

Sahr says robotics is an excellent step towards an engineering degree in the future.

“We had two students, Hunter Burckoff and Cam Nasinec, who went on to get a degree and work in the field, doing CAD work and decoding,” Sahr says.

The current students are looking forward to next year. They find out what the next competition skill will be in August.

“We begin in August with Bot Camp (like boot camp), and then in September we start meeting three times a week, after school,” Sahr explains. “The kids get pretty excited, and some even take totes of parts home over weekends to build the robots.”

Interest in robotics is growing again, after having peaked during COVID. Sahr says there are some schools with a lot of teams, but USC competes with all them pretty well.