TechHounds meets for announcements before breaking out into divisions. Zachary Bonewit, head coach of TechHOUNDS and engineering teacher, said the divisions will continue to test the robot before the team’s first competition in March.

TechHounds finished its build season, which began in the first week of January, on Feb. 19. Zachary Bonewit, head coach of TechHOUNDS and engineering teacher, said the team has created a well-designed robot.

“[The robot’s] coming together. The kids have done a really nice job this year with the manufacturing and design. It looks really nice,” Bonewit said. “We are getting close to a point where we’re going to start testing things to find out how well it’s going to perform, but I’m overall pretty confident with how it’s going.”

Ryan Forrest, electrical and programming division co-lead and senior, said that after the build season is finished, the team will work towards perfecting and fine tuning the actions of the robot.

“Afterwards, we’ll be meeting as much as we can to ‘tune in’, which is a method of control, and tuning the autonomous mode. It won’t be formal meetings at the school anymore, but, for the programming and electrical divisions, we’ll still be meeting,” Forrest said. “I’ll be working on autonomous and tuning some stuff up with the practice bot because the main bot will be in a bag.”

This year, the robot’s task at the competition will be to transport items across a field. Bonewit said the team has prepared a specific environment to test these actions.
“We have a practice field. We have a practice robot. It’s the exact same as our competition robot, so we’ll be using that to practice, practice driving, test systems and make sure everything works the way we expect it to work,” Bonewit said “If it doesn’t, we can make changes to our practice robot to then later take those changes and make those changes to our competition robot when we get to our first competition.”

TechHOUNDS will have its first competition at Lafayette Jefferson High School on March 22. By James Yin

Click here to learn more about the game and the task that the robot must complete.