Canton, MA – Lenox High School’s Robotics Team, Enginuity, made up of eight students and two faculty mentors, set off again last Saturday morning at 5:15 am for the long drive to Canton High School to take part in another qualifying tournament for the FIRST® Tech Challenge International Robotics Competition.
Founded by Dean Kamen in 1989, the mission of FIRST® is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators. FIRST® Tech Challenge teams design, build, program, and operate robots to compete in a head-to-head challenge in an alliance format.

Saturday’s competition consisted of 29 rounds where random alliances of two teams each worked cooperatively against opposing alliances to get their robots to complete a variety of tasks within three minutes. For the first part of each round, the robots had to act autonomously to try and place plastic cones atop different sized obstacles, and then maneuver to a randomly selected destination. In next segment of each round, human drivers took control of the robots in a race to collect points by picking up and placing cones and performing various other tasks on the playing field.

Facing off against 18 other teams from around the state, Enginuity’s robot got off to a strong start, quickly leapfrogging into fourth place. Unfortunately, in a round after lunch, a critical cable started to unwind and caught on a piece of the robot, crippling the gripper arm and hobbling Enginuity’s efforts. The team worked furiously between rounds to repair the damage, but by the end of the qualifying rounds Enginuity was once again ranked in 8th place. For the finals, the top four teams each got to choose another team to form their alliance. To the audience’s surprise, the 1st ranked team, Circuit Makers, from Shrewsbury, MA, picked Enginuity to join them in the finals.

The semi-finals were best 2 out of three, and in two fast and decisive matches, Circuit Makers and Enginuity soundly defeated their opposing alliance of two teams from Boston. Advancing to the finals, Circuit Makers and Enginuity won the first match, but in the second match something happened to Circuit Makers’s robot, taking it out of action in the final minute of the competition and allowing Hawk Robotics of Westwood, MA, and Sense & Sound Robotics of Franklin, MA, to win the match. Tensions were high going into the third and final match. Seconds after the bell rang to start the match the arm of Circuit Makers’s robot completely fell off, rendering the robot useless. Team Enginuity battled on, but in the end could not keep up with their two opponents.

This second-place finish, together with their first-place finish at an earlier competition have earned Team Enginuity a place at the State Championship on March 4 in Andover, MA.