TAS Robotics Team 4253 "Raid Zero" Wins Taiwan FRC Regional

By Lindsey Kundel, Director of Communications & Marketing

Photo credit: Gustavo V. ('22), Upper School Student (and former TAS Communications Intern)

The TAS FRC Robotics Team 4253 "Raid Zero" took first place in the Taipei Regional held in New Taipei City in early March. The regional hosted 35 teams from all around Taiwan.

Three other schools also received championship qualifying awards at the regional including Team 6998 "NNKIEH" from the National Nanke International Experimental High School, Team 8020 "Cyberpunk" from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, and Team 7527 "Kaohsiung power" from the Zhongzheng Technical High School in Kaohsiung City. 

TAS Team 4253 "Raid Zero" also won the excellence in engineering award for their robot's performance in the games.

According to Director of the Tech Cube Matt Fagen, the game at this year's regional involved shooting balls into an overhead target in the center of the field while opponent robots played heavy and physical defense.  The match ended with a robot climb, where the 150 lbs. machines had to climb up a series of consecutively higher monkey bars (up to 8 feet)  to gain extra points.

"Taiwan FRC teams have become pretty fierce competition," said Fagen. "It was amazing to see how our students came together in their various sub-teams to keep the bot on the field and winning matches:  Strategy and Statistics Team changing our game plan for each match, Mechanical Team doing quick repairs after sustaining damage in the minutes between matches, Programming Team adding new functionality on the fly to keep us competitive, and the Drive Team was on fire!"

TAS had two teams who qualified to compete in this year's regional and covered the entire range of the ranking spectrum.  Fagen described the winning team, 4253, as employing an "offensive" team strategy, while team 8503 employed a more defensive strategy.

Both of the 150 lbs. TAS robots were built over only six weeks leading up to the regional and Fagen described them as having a truly "impressive" array of features.

"Our 'varsity' team 4253 ranked first at the end of qualifications," said Fagen, "and our 'JV' team 8503 ranked 35th. Team 8503, despite numerous technical problems, continued to fight to keep the robot going through every match and ended up being the first pick for 3rd alliance. They worked super hard and appeared to be having just as much fun as the first-ranked team. Maybe a little more."

The two TAS teams 4253 and 8503 faced off in the very first elimination match, with team 8503 playing fierce defense on 4253.  

"It was great to see these teams collaborate off the field, compete hard against each other, and go right back to being one big family again," said Fagen. "In fact, it is actually a big family.  We even had siblings spread across both teams."

The FIRST Robotics world championships will be held this April in Houston, TX (USA).