Cal High’s Grizzly Overdrive robotics team made history last month by becoming the first from Cal to advance to the VEX Robotics Worlds Championship.
Featuring hundreds of teams from 39 countries battling in countless matches over four grueling 12-hour days, the competition ran from April 21-24 at America’s Center in St. Louis.
Cal’s eight-student team won four of their 12 matches. Although Grizzly Overdrive came up short of earning any awards, they consistently excelled in regional and state competitions in order to make it to the world stage.
Grizzly Overdrive, also known as team 1516X, includes seniors Avery Ngo, Aditya Patra, and Balaji Saravana Gupta; juniors Lucas Anderson, Matthew Baugh, Omkar Anand, and Pratik Ganesh; and sophomore Christon Rex.
Intro to Engineering Design and Principles of Engineering teacher John Reed has been the Robotics Club adviser since 2011.
Cal’s Robotics Club is one of the oldest on campus. The most qualified members from the club are selected for the competition teams 1516A and 1516X. The club also features a novice program for beginners.
“Robotics is this huge field that very much paves future paths for what’s been going on in the world,” senior club president Sushrut Pola said.
Pola, who is part of Team 1516A, highlighted the hard work and dedication that Grizzly Overdrive devoted to ensuring success and reaching the World Championship.
Grizzly Overdrive’s first competition and award of the season was at Foothill High School in Pleasanton, where the team won the Innovate Award. The award is given to the team who not only has a unique design but also a well documented engineering notebook.
The team then won design awards at River Island High in Lathrop and Dougherty Valley.
The Design Award focuses on the team that best uses an organized, professional approach to the building process. It focuses on two components: a high-quality notebook and a strong team interview.
While Cal won three separate awards, only one win is required to qualify for the California Region 2 VEX V5 High School Championships, also known as the State Championship, said Ngo, a team captain.
The state competition was March 7-8 and divides competitors into four different regions. Grizzly Overdrive was placed in Region 2, which is considered one of the most competitive robotics regions in the world.
“I would say the second most competitive region is East China,” Ngo said.
VEX regions are geographically determined across 50 countries by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundations with boundaries depending on each individual location.
Cal won their Design Award at Merrill West High School in Tracy for the state competition, which qualified the team for the World Championship.
This year’s game for the VEX season was called Push Back, which focused on robots picking up blocks and scoring them into tubes. Teams competed in 2v2 alliances.
To prepare for the international competition, the team rebuilt its robot to improve its performance.
“Our new design, an S-curve bot, increased our robot’s capacity to hold seven game blocks to around 10 or 11,” Ngo said. “This helps especially in the skills challenge, which is an individual performance-based event.”
The team also worked on improving their engineering notebook and tuning their robot for more consistency and accuracy.
“We start by breaking the game into different parts and identifying what we need to accomplish,” junior Omkar Anand said. “Then we brainstorm different solutions that could meet each requirement and evaluate them based on how well they might perform. After that, we choose the best solution for each function.”
The team created a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model, which is an online 3D design of the robot.
“We split the robot into different sections,” Anand said. “For example, one part is for collecting game pieces, another is for scoring them on one goal, and another is for scoring on a different goal. Each section is designed separately.”
Once the team is satisfied with each subsystem, all of it is combined into one full robot. The complete system is tested, and final adjustments are made to improve performance.
Students spent 12-14 hours each day during weekends before the World Championship, but normally they spent about 10 hours working together weekly. The team also practiced interviews, which had to be completed on Zoom before April 21.
At worlds, thousands of teams were separated into smaller divisions. Each division was a mini-tournament, where teams only faced those in that division. Teams play 10 matches, and a ranking is decided based on the performance across all matches.
After qualifications, the top 16 teams move on to the elimination bracket. Those teams pick their alliance partners, and if they lose against another alliance, both teams are eliminated.
“We look for teams that have been consistent,” Ngo said. “Winning the autonomous period gives a bonus of around 10 points, which can’t be taken away. That makes a huge difference, so we prioritize teams that can reliably perform autonomous routines.”
The competition includes a brief autonomous period where robots are controlled without human input.
About three years ago, the club struggled with funding. Reed credited Kadon Liang, who graduated from Cal last year and is a current student at UC Berkeley, with being able to turn the corner in fundraising.
“That’s really hard to do as a student, but he managed to do it, and they’ve continued this year,” Reed said.
Despite financial issues, Reed noted how the club was still able to bounce back and advance to major events like the World Championship.
Although Reed will be retiring this year, he is optimistic the club will continue successfully because the robotics culture is so prominent on campus. He’s also confident in the program because
Accelerated Algebra 2 and AP Calculus AB teacher Surbhi Jain is replacing him.
“This year is one of the years the team has been the strongest,” Anand said. “It’s the first year Cal has made it to the World Championship. We’re all really proud of how far we’ve come and how far we’re hoping to achieve.”
