Somo robotics brings home ninth at first ever competition

On Saturday Feb. 2, the newly assembled Samo Robotics team took ninth place out of 29 teams at their first ever tournament. The Robotics Club, a new team at Samo, is fully student run and has been in operation since late September of 2018. The team started when Benjamin Swerdlow (’22) and some of his friends realized that Samo did not have a robotics team, and they decided to create the team themselves. They meet every Wednesday at lunch, and have practices on Sundays from 9:30 a.m.-12 p.m..Robotics team leader, Swerdlow, was pleased with the team's performance and is optimistic about the future of the team.“Our competition went pretty well. The teams that beat us had much more experience, and for a first year team, we did pretty great,” Swerdlow said.A robotics competition consists of robots from many different schools competing to complete a certain task. The task at Samo’s competition was to take their robot, which was a rover-like vehicle, and move a randomly set material to a hangar. It was the robot’s objective to leave the hangar and go over a crater, then reattach to the base that it came from. The task is the same for all robots and the goal is for one’s robot to “defeat” the other robots by completing the task in a better fashion than the others. There are certain points given for how efficient and how smooth the robot looks while completing the tasks, awarded by a referee.  Stefano Ingargiola (’20) enjoyed the experience that the team had at their first competition.“It’s definitely an interesting experience getting to see other schools, the wide range of creativity and how other teams go about making their robots,” Ingargiola said.   As far as qualifications, Swerdlow and the team are committed to the idea that anyone should be able to join. However, the team is already overfilled this year, so they have been working on applications for next year. There is a limit for how many people can attend a competition, but the amount of people that can contribute to the robot is unlimited and the team is open to having as many members as possible. Swerdlow and the team hopes for the future to bring in more coders, as the team of 24 has 20 builders, three writers and one coder.The team is planning multiple fundraisers and looking at bringing in speakers from UCLA in the future. They are also in the process of founding a local Boys and Girls Club team and possibly starting a team at Lincoln Middle School. “While a lot is up in the air, the one thing that is certain is that we will be back next year,” Swerdlow said.Swerdlow encourages Samo students and families to visit the team’s GoFundMe to view their team’s video as well as donate to the fast-growing team.